Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

Books that do a tenth of what Left Behind has done are smashing successes.

I've written enough books with real celebrities, such as Walter Payton and Hank Aaron and Billy Graham, to know that fame looks good only to people who don't have it.

Of course, bad marriages are so pervasive that they have invaded the faith community too.

Left Behind takes what to some people may be unbelievable predictions from the Bible and shows how they might play out. It makes the events of biblical prophecy understandable and thus believable.

The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.

In my opinion, Jesus is God's attempt to reach man. But while I believe Jesus is the way to God, it makes no sense to hate people who disagree.

While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

Broken relationships are a source of heavy heartbreak that seem to affect every family.

I love inventing worlds and characters and settings and scenarios.

The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them.

As for dialogue, I think it keeps things moving to cut to the chase.

When you come to Christ as a real young person, I think when you become a teen-ager either you rebel or you search, doubt, and wonder.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

Actually 'Soon' has more than the Left Behind series, but I really believe less is more.

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

Funny, I don't feel any more powerful today than yesterday.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

It's made me more expectant of the imminent return of Jesus, and also more sensitive to the people around me. Knowing Jesus will return soon makes me want all the more to tell people about him and all that he offers.

I fear it's because religion is man's attempt to reach God, and when he feels he has succeeded, he cannot abide anyone else's claim to have done the same.

I was raised as a Christian but the transaction has to be made by yourself - you and God - at some point.

People are scared to death and they're looking for something beyond themselves.

I was raised in a Christian home and, in fact, my mother led me to Christ as a youngster.

I don't see success as the goal. Obedience is the goal.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

When I was a junior camp counselor and it was my job to tell the campers a bedtime story or devotional, I would tell them a rapture story.

The Christian market has less competition and lower standards.

In the prequel we're going to tell about the characters before Left Behind, and the book would end with the rapture instead of start with the rapture like the first one did.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we're going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he's read and written.

I think all fiction should be fair game for the Christian market, except porn, of course.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.