Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.
We don't know how bad we are until we try to be good. Nothing exposes our selfishness and spiritual pwerlessness like prayer.
In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the nonpersonal, nonreal praying that you've been taught.
When you have fans who are hassling you the entire game and you ignore them, they respect you because their job is to try and distract you. And if they don't distract you, that means you're focused on doing your job. And who knows, by the end, someti...
If you're a disheveled, easily distracted person, it's always scary when someone asks what your plan is for the day. We don't know our plans. Distracted people make plans "in transit.
Find a quiet place, and just read. If you’re reading an ebook, clear away everything else but your ebook reader. Then you settle into the reading, and enjoy it. Bask in the luxury of reading without distractions.
We have an allergic reaction to dependency, but this is the state of the heart most necessary for a praying life. A need heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer.
Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.
I set a goal for myself everyday when I write - 10 pages a day - and it's much harder because I'm too dumb to turn off my Twitter and everything so it's always on and it's a real distraction. It's a major distraction.
My house has too many distractions. There's the email. There's checking my Amazon ranking. I know I'm the only author who's ever done that, ever. There's the fax. Too many distractions. I like to go out and write.
If you wait, your heavenly Father will pick you up, carry you out into the night, and make your life sparkle. He wants to dazzle you with the wonder of his love.
Self-will and prayer are both ways of getting things done. At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image, but at the center of prayer is God, carving me in his Son's image.
Prayer mirrors the gospel. In the gospel, the Father takes us as we are and gives us his gift of salvation. In prayer, the Father receives us as we are because of Jesus and gives us his gift of help.
Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. We can unlock our lives with a pencil tip.
Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.
I'm quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don't mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.
My son died from cancer. My granddaughter died from cancer. I have a lot of reasons to think that reality is not a friendly neighborhood. And the stories that I tell distract me, and if I do the job right, they distract people from things that are ha...
Watching movies is my one distraction.
Working is a great distraction technique.
God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden... The best gift of the desert is God's presence... The protective love of the Shepherd gives me courage to face the interior j...
Inner Awareness is often gained in incremental steps at first. The distraction of the perceived physical world dictates this. However, once one realizes this process, a new skill in “awareness recognition” emerges… and like riding a bike for th...
