Jealous of the crazy gay kid. That doesn't sound right.""Hey, Sol," she said, her tone getting serious for a second. "Those are two things about you out of a million. Don't box yourself in.

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

...a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....

...people quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression...

Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth__ ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.