Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.

Careless shepherd make excellent dinner for wolf.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

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

They were a group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a...

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.

We all need to look into the dark side of our nature – that’s where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we’re busy denying.

Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

I know nothing of God or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that would damn or save my soul.

Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.

Women are one of the Almighty’s enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

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.

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

I’ve seen public opinion shift like the wind and put out the very fire it lighted.

When you suffer an attack of nerves you’re being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?

Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.

The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I’ve always had a very close relationship with them.

It’s true that it’s a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

Doesn’t all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred...

A good deed never goes unpunished.

Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we’re going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he’s read and written.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.

I’ve never been one to tear the social fabric.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.

Nothing is proved, all is permitted.

Show me an elitist, and I’ll show you a loser.

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them.

Do not wave stick when trying to catch dog.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that’s the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

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