I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

I just want to lobby for God.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts.

All my playmates on the farm were black, and later, when I started school in Plains, it was all white. But I was always eager to get back home to my friends in Archery.

We cannot have communion with Christ till we are in union with Him; and we cannot have communion with the Church till we are in vital union with it.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

Because I was suspicious of the traditional Christian church, I tended to tar them all with the same brush. That was a mistake, because there are righteous people working in a whole rainbow of belief systems – from Hasidic Jews to right-wing Bible Belters to charismatic Catholics.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

My first job was singing on the Cas Walker radio show in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was about 10 years old, and I thought it was big time.

Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible that in any profane history.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

The three most powerful and most apparent means used by Rome to retain her power over the minds of her votaries are Ignorance, Superstition, and Persecution.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

God is everywhere.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

I’m trying to throw a big broad net to try to get people interested in God and believe that He’s for them and has a purpose.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.

The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.

The Bible says that Christians are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. On the job, in the grocery store, even among unsaved friends and family members, God’s people are there to bring seasoning to an unsavory situation.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.

I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

For Christians, who believe they are created in the image of God, it is the Godhead, diversity in unity and the three-in-oneness of God, which we and all creation reflect.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

It is well known that the Soviet Union closely regulates all organizations and movements, including religion.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines… There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.

We’re all put on this earth to walk in His image, the Master.

I want to tell people about the meaning of the cross.

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother’s kitchen. If I don’t have time to cook, I’ll just read a cookbook.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

Christ didn’t choose the rich to preach the doctrine; he choose 12 poor ignorant workers – that is, he chose the proletariat of the times.

God is so big. It’s a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we’re small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.

Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

The one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy but love.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.