I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.
My hope is that I hit it big with something, and then I'll have enough of a cushion to carve out time to write a book. That would be my passion project.
Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.
What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.
I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.
My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'
I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.
Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.
I'm just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it's any good or not.
I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.
I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'
My favorite book is 'Redeeming Love.' It was my first as a born-again Christian, my statement of faith, and the most exciting year I've spent writing anything.
One thing that's really delightful is my books tend to attract people who are funny, so I get the benefit of people writing me with things that crack me up.
My studio, nicknamed 'Funny Farm,' is in a hidden location. It's very private. Not only do I create my photography there, but it is also where I write my books and create music.
I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.
Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
What I would do is when I was younger I would draw in a sketch book something that happened in my life and then write a little something on the side about what happened or what the story.
I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.
