Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort isn’t all that comfortable. And even if they secretly want for something better.
If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don’t have conflict, it can’t be a good story.
The economy is turning around, so that’s going to help a little bit.
There’s a lot of letters, and a lot of people come say “hi” at book signings, but I’m amazed at how normal everybody is.
The sexual conquest is huge with men in terms of affirming themselves and their feelings of masculinity. That’s a misguided kind of affirmation. That is not helpful, but that stuff happens.
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.