I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our d...
Whatever you call me, my parents encouraged me to go to college and become a book lover, and to trust that I could do nearly anything if I could find the right book at the library. It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but t...
To all my readers. I don't need my daughter's okay to do anything. I was a writer before she was my daughter. The CRANK books were inspired by my desire to keep others from following in her path, but they are FICTION. And seriously, WTF do I need her...
Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else; it'll spread over into the rest of your life. It'll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being... There are NO limits. There are plateus, but yo...
I went back and listened to the first three albums I made and tried to figure out what was special about them, why people keep going back to them. I think it was because I didn't know what I was doing. I had no idea if they were going to play it on t...
The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that ...
Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a s...
It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism...
The Holy Spirit doesn't need to equip you for what you're not going to do, so if you're in rebellion against Jesus and refusing His right to be Lord, He doesn't need to send the Holy Spirit to equip you for service. And, tragically, you miss out on t...
Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never t...
No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive fo...
Look in your local Christian Bookstore. You could take most of the books there, throw them into the sea, and not lose anything valuable. The vast majority of them are just placebos that superficially attack trivial problems. During the eras when the ...
We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, pre...
Yeah, and so Max and Dylan are supposed to, like, go to Germany and have kids together," I heard Gazzy say. My eyes popped open and I bolted upright. "What?" Fang said, his voice icy. "Gazzy!" I yelled. Wide blue eyes looked at me in surprise, then b...
Have I ever pretended to be something? I think back in college I think I might have told a girl that I was a professional tennis player once. And then, of course, she had never heard of me so I had to dig deeper. 'I'm just sort of on the playing sate...
I don't want to force anything on anyone. I'm not trying to bust you over the head and make you buy this record or this song or whatever. I'm presenting it to you so you can take it in. You know, it's like trying to force a kid to eat broccoli. If I ...
It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rathe...
People always say that in England we lead shallow lives. Our lives must be shallow because we live in a country where nobody believes in anything any more. My whole life, I've been told: 'Western civilization? An old bitch gone in the teeth,' And so ...
If we recognize that Spirit is all powerful, and cannot be hurt, and that only Spirit exists, then nothing that happens here matters. And we see everyone and everything from the point of wholeness. Even the ‘deceitful’ thing that happened is prob...
I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as ...
I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining t...
