Quotes

[on the Academy Awards snub of The Exorcist (1973), which out of ten nominations won only for Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay (which went to Blatty himself)] The Academy should fold its tent and go back to baking apple strudel or whatever they can do well.

[on The Exorcist] If the universe is clockwork and man is no more than molecular structures, how is it there is love as a God would love and that a man like Jesuit Damien Karras would deliberately give up his life for a stranger, the alien corpus of Regan MacNeil? This is surely an enigma far more puzzling and far more worth pondering than the scandalous problem of evil; this is the mystery of goodness. It is the point all critics miss.

How many husbands and wives must believe they have fallen out of love because their hearts no longer race at the sight of their beloveds?

I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us.

Being a Catholic, I believe that we all have a foot in two worlds. The one that we're conscious of is in time, but now and then a freak like me gets a flash from the other foot, and that one, I think, is in eternity, where time does not exist and so the future and the past are both the present. So now and again when I'm feeling a tingling in that other foot, I believe that I'm seeing the future.

We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops - which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.

Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow.

And yet even from evil - there will finally come good in some way; in some way that we may never understand or even see. Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness ... And perhaps even Satan - Satan, in spite of himself - somehow serves to work out the will of God.