When you're not writing, you're not doing anything else either because everything you do goes into the writing.

Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.

I began writing The Cold Song in the months following my fathers death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: What now? How to proceed?

Seek the Lord while you must.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your words...they'll destroy my soul.

Write only if you wish to read it again and again...

Just as a man does not desire food until he is hungry, so does he not desire the salvation of Christ until he knows why he needs Christ.

Another occupation might have been better.

With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.

I changed the pressure from negative to positive. So, instead of thinking everybody wanted to see me fail, I decided everybody wanted to see me win, since I wanted to see myself win.

My children didn't have my advantages; I was born into abject poverty.

Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.

God's glory is the created brightness that surrounds God’s revelation of himself.