Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.

Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing. The tensions of being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her—in the same sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself.