'It is when the individual's faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and where there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost. Fiction, made according to its own laws, is an antidote to such a tendency, for it renews our knowledge that we live in the mystery from which we draw our abstractions.'
Flannery O'Connor, 'The Church and the Fiction Writer' in Mystery and Manners, p.146.
