We have to have positive male role models.
When we talk about the decline of the American family, I think we have to go back to the Industrial Revolution.
Half the time I pick up a book, that’s what I’m trying to get.
I don’t read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;.
I posted the first three chapters and I had enough people say that chapter two was dragging that I cut it out just before the book went to press. And I’m glad I did. The book is a lot better without it.
It blew my mind that what I was thinking was actually applicable to people’s lives, and it certainly revolutionized family.
All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book.
It’s possible to do both as a writer – to engage and have a family and all that good stuff – and I chose not to for the sake of the career.
I think writers can get a little melodramatic sometimes about their work, and it helps me not to do that, to just say, “Well, this is how I make a living, and I need to become a very good craftsman.”
I have friends who are writers, but we don’t tend to talk about literature very much. It’s just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I’m working on.
If a piece of genius comes, it comes, and it if doesn’t, it doesn’t.
There are about 360,000 churches in America, so we could mentor a million kids within a short period of time if everyone signed on, which, of course, is a pipedream, but we’re going to reach toward that.
If you buy the website, maybe you’ll do something with it. But so far I haven’t; we’ll see.
If the abortion issue is important to me, this is how you tackle that issue.
I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.
I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest.
When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn’t normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.
Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn’t read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.
My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and there are some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.
It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality or it would not be reasonable.