Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives...

Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives.

I read newspapers, textbooks on crime. I talk to private investigators, police officers, jail administrators, doctors, lawyers, career criminals.

There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don’t know everything about it. You can’t.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

Never have children, only grand children.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind...

I’m not terrifically comfortable with even thinking about what I’ve accomplished in relation to who I am and how I relate to other people.

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

Most of the time we think we’re sick, it’s all in the mind.

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.

Through Kinsey, I get to test my ingenuity and my skills with imaginary firearms… all without leaving the safety of my office chair.

Probably what pushed the Russians over the edge was SDI. They realized they couldn’t beat us.

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?