Life & Wisdom Quote by William Peter Blatty

Conversion stories usually trade in tidy epiphanies; Blatty’s line is pricklier, and that’s the point. “The research into it affected me” is an almost clinical admission, as if he’s wary of sounding gullible while describing an experience that, by his standards, should have made him more skeptical. The verb “affected” does quiet work: it signals contact, not conclusion. He isn’t claiming proof so much as impact - the sense that investigating the dark, the irrational, the allegedly impossible left a residue he couldn’t scrub off.

Then comes the pivot: “And the novel… strengthened my faith.” It’s a fascinating reversal of the modern expectation that knowledge dissolves belief. For Blatty, research doesn’t demystify; it sharpens the edges of mystery. The subtext is that the process of building a convincing fiction required taking the spiritual world seriously enough to make it narratively functional. In other words, craft becomes a conduit: to write the uncanny with authority, he had to inhabit its logic, and that inhabitation rearranged him.

Context matters. Blatty is forever tethered to The Exorcist, a work popularly filed under “horror” but conceived as an argument dressed as entertainment: a thriller that smuggles in metaphysical stakes. This sentence reads like a mission statement for that project. He’s telling you the book wasn’t merely inspired by faith; it was a feedback loop, where investigating possession, doubt, and evil didn’t cheapen religion - it made it harder to dismiss.