I have a lot of faith in President Obama. The thing that seems to be true of him is that he doesn't speak when you would expect him to speak. He's very measured in his response to things. He likes to get all the facts first before he shoots his mouth...
No matter what has happened to you in the past or what is going on in your life right now, it has no power to keep you from having an amazingly good future if you will walk by faith in God. God loves you! He wants you to live with victory over sin so...
Truth is, I think, if God just gave us our daily bread, many of us would be angry. 'That's all you're going to give me? You're just going to give me enough to sustain me for today? What about tomorrow or next year or 10, 20, 30 years from now? I want...
We're all screwed up. And the way Christians mess things up is we act like we've got it going on. And if we would just stay in that place of, 'Hey, we're all screwed up and but for the grace of God, none of us have a shot here.' We need to have a sen...
We can never make ourselves better by trying... praying more or longer, studying more of the Word, performing good works, etc. Don't get me wrong... it's not bad to do any of these things. In fact, it's good. It's just that doing them in God's power ...
Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn't know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. ...
Sometimes Christians live in a terror of universal obligation: AIDS over here, people to be saved over here, a crushing sense of low-level guilt every day of our lives. Question to ask: Where has God put me right now? I need to say no to a whole bunc...
The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and ...
I really liked the idea of creating a journal myself. It's like the way I clear my throat. I write a page every day, maybe 500 words. It could be about something I'm specifically worried about in the new novel; it could be a question I want answered;...
I've always enjoyed being in the background, sitting in a cafe, watching people. But now, when I sit in a cafe, sometimes people watch me. It's a challenge. But it's usually people who want to say 'your book transformed my life', or something... so t...
At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn't allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many ...
I don't think I do any formal research. Life is my research. I always begin with a character. I write a chapter about the character and what he or she is doing, thinking, but I don't know what the story is about yet. Plot was always my downfall until...
When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged...
I used to think that when I finished a book, I was finished with it. But it's like a wonderful Hydra. Every time a head disappears, more heads appear, so I will be writing for the rest of my life. The more books I write, the more books I find that I ...
If I had all the filmmakers that traumatized me when I was a little kid in this room, all I would say is, 'Thank you,' because they've made me who I am. As much as I say 'trauma,' it all comes from a place of love. The fact that I am feeling emotions...
let anyone using those weasel words “freedom of worship” know, they have “freedom of worship” in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. “Freedom of worship” says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or wheneve...
there grew up around the campfires stories of a great silver stallion seen galloping over wind-packed snow way up on the Ramshead Range; of a ghost horse that drank at the Crackenback River; of a horse that all men thought was dead appearing in a bli...
Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when h...
That was the trouble with the supernatural, Vimbai thought--you didn't know what laws ruled it, and what was a coincidence and what was a sign and what was weird and what wasn't. It was like a whodunit, only the clues refused to be arranged into any ...
The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for t...
The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body’s direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body’s response to thought. Indirectly, an ...
