Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

I think that we're all always just working on finding how that balance functions for us, given today's circumstances.

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

When we appropriate God's great enablers-His grace and His peace-we can achieve gentleness and calmness even during hard times.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

I'll never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1, 500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

Mostly the loss teaches us only about the value of things.

Don't think about what can happen in a month. Don't think about what can happen in a year. Just focus on the 24 hours in front of you and do what you can to get closer to where you want to be!

I love clothes but it's a struggle for me to get out of jeans and a baggy jumper.

It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress.

Which one of the three candidates would you want your daughter to marry?

I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed