Everyone knows the beautiful story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac. How this noble father led his child to the slaughter; how Isaac meekly submitted; how the farce went on till the lad was bound and laid on the altar, and how God then stopped t...
One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with s...
Whatever I've experienced in my life is a part of my story, and I'm proud of that. But it's someone who wakes up early, works all day, believes in charitable work, business-minded, diligent, accountable, problem-solving... I'm so much about school, c...
I know you're always supposed to want more of everything. But in truth, I'm having a nice ebb and flow of being in my daughter's life every day and getting to keep my work life alive. I'm not nominated for ten thousand everythings every minute, but I...
I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating...
There are a lot more tabloids in England that like to report other things in your life, some of which are true and some of which are exaggerated and untrue. There have been stories where people claim to have seen me in one place and I wasn't even in ...
I love to work out and really enjoy the outdoors. I like to immerse myself with sport-related activities and spending quality time with people. I find people to be very inspiring, and I get a lot of motivation from listening and interacting with them...
Because I never plan anything out ahead of time, I'm always in the process of learning about my characters. Without a biographical sketch to guide me, I discover things about my heroines as the stories unfold. Only in 'Body Double' did I discover tha...
One of the things I've realised is that I am very simple. My wife asked me once if I loved her. I said: 'Look love, I'm a simple man. I love you. End of story.' But I guess you gotta keep saying it with women. I guess she needed reassurance.
I have several books I can read over and over. With fiction, it's 'The Stand' by Stephen King, which is my favorite all time. I read that at least once a year, the version which has 100,000 extra words, which is like the director's cut and unabridged...
Since first hearing the story as a child, any mention of the 'Boston Tea Party' has elicited in me an excitement that is uniquely American. When I heard rumblings that there was a new Tea Party, I got goose bumps. I love tea, I love parties, I hate t...
I grew up in the church, and I always kind of knew Bible stories and knew the Sunday school answers, but when I was a freshman in high school I joined youth group, and that's when I started to see radical love; that's when I started to see what Chris...
I've got an extra-specific story about Dr. Dre. I saw him when I was 9 years old in Compton - him and Tupac. They were shooting the second 'California Love' video. My pops had seen him and ran back to the house and got me, put me on his neck, and we ...
We use the word 'synoptic' to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means 'seeing together,' because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke - whoever wrote those Gospels - used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all o...
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist m...
The growth of my love story had been gradual but my success had always existed and both coupled together formed a deadly combination that was detrimental to our love. I wanted people to love me. She wanted them to leave her alone.
I don’t have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.
I really told my story as I saw it in 'Cross to Bear,' and I was pleased - and a bit surprised - by how well it was received and how it sold. No. 2 on the 'New York Times' bestseller list? I'll take that any day, my man!
People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very d...
I definitely am a performer, and there are different styles of stand-up; I mean, some people are writers and they get onstage to get jokes out, and that's definitely not what I do. I like to just go up and, if I'm telling a story about someone, I'll ...
I do this acting thing mostly for myself. I like to make a connection and communicate with the audience to make myself feel less lonely. I also do it to develop my own character, so sometimes I do it to just be away in a certain area that I've never ...
