Novelist Quotes

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

You're gifted to do something.

You need to have time to really hear God.

You need to get down among the people who are the dirtiest and dustiest, and the depravity, and you need to see Christ's light shining there.

You don't have love without sacrifice; you can't have sacrifice without love.

There were times when I was so sick of talking about the Bible.

The general market wants what I do.

Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual.

Reader loyalty will stay because I'm not changing.

My characters are not plastic.

I'm receiving 300 to 500 letters every week from people telling me that God used my stories to save their marriage or to introduce them to Christ or to heal a relationship that had been broken.

I write about true-life type things.

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

I developed a deep sadness for celebrities, a pity that they often are caught in a plastic world that runs too hard and too fast, and that many times that world means destroyed relationships with everyone they know and love.

I can spend 10 to 15 minutes with someone, and they can tell me what they're going through. I may never have gone through that, but I get it on a really deep level.

I came to Christ in my early 20s.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.

You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.

All of life is a foreign country.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

My witness is the empty sky.

Accept loss forever.

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.