Novelist Quotes

A chaplain's biggest gift is to be present and just listen.

People are scared to death and they're looking for something beyond themselves.

Of course, bad marriages are so pervasive that they have invaded the faith community too.

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Left Behind takes what to some people may be unbelievable predictions from the Bible and shows how they might play out. It makes the events of biblical prophecy understandable and thus believable.

It's made me more expectant of the imminent return of Jesus, and also more sensitive to the people around me. Knowing Jesus will return soon makes me want all the more to tell people about him and all that he offers.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

I've written enough books with real celebrities, such as Walter Payton and Hank Aaron and Billy Graham, to know that fame looks good only to people who don't have it.

I was raised in a Christian home and, in fact, my mother led me to Christ as a youngster.

I was raised as a Christian but the transaction has to be made by yourself - you and God - at some point.

I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.

I love inventing worlds and characters and settings and scenarios.

I fear it's because religion is man's attempt to reach God, and when he feels he has succeeded, he cannot abide anyone else's claim to have done the same.

I don't see success as the goal. Obedience is the goal.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Funny, I don't feel any more powerful today than yesterday.

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

Books that do a tenth of what Left Behind has done are smashing successes.

Actually 'Soon' has more than the Left Behind series, but I really believe less is more.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

In the prequel we're going to tell about the characters before Left Behind, and the book would end with the rapture instead of start with the rapture like the first one did.

In my opinion, Jesus is God's attempt to reach man. But while I believe Jesus is the way to God, it makes no sense to hate people who disagree.

As for dialogue, I think it keeps things moving to cut to the chase.

Broken relationships are a source of heavy heartbreak that seem to affect every family.

You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.

With publicity comes humiliation.

Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I do, every day.

On bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.