Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it’s true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
Most of us get our history through story.
Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.
My next book – each one while I’m working on it – dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn’t, why would I write it?
It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I’ve made none the champion.
The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.
I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.
I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
I ask you, is it the fig tree’s fault that it’s not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?
Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
Books are something social – a writer speaking to a reader – so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
I can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.
Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.
In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
Christianity is a religion in a rush.