"Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed."
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Book quotes (page 216 of 1049)
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"The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page."
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"I always hope that readers, of my books, will take away whatever is most meaningful to them wherever they are at right now. It might be the message of love. Or what it means to really live. Or the role that emotion does - or does not play - in our lives. But I think ultimately, the thing I took away was the idea of surrender to God."
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"I always want to write something better than the last book."
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"I'm around my kids every day. I'm regular. We're a regular family. My wife cooks, she washes clothes, I read books, I pump my own gas, I get my own hair cut."
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"I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'."
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"[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?" I notice that I don't hear from them much lately."
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"One always likes one's latest book best. That's a natural feeling."
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"If Francoise Sagan hadn't written a book called A Chateau in Sweden, I would certainly write a short story called A Chateau in Puerto Rico. And I may yet."
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"I'm not a character in any of my books."
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"Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does."
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"The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book."
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"I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family."
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"I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess."
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"Most apologetic books are really written for Christians, even the ones that purport to be written for non-believers."
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"One of the most frequent responses I get from non-Christian readers is: 'I'm not sure I agree with all this, but I must say this is the first book I've read by a Christian that didn't treat me like I was an idiot.'"
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"I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books."
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"The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax."
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"By cultivating an interest in a few good books which contain the result of the toil or the quintessence of the genius of some of the most gifted thinkers of the world, we need not live on the marsh and in the mists. The slopes and ridges invite us."
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"I started writing serious books so late because I knew Id be accused of riding on my fathers coattails."
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