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.

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.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Democracy is stronger than terrorism, and we will not cower to the terrorists' campaign of fear.

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

I don't fear death because I don't fear anything I don't understand. When I start to think about it, I order a massage and it goes away.

Right out of high school I never had the fear of getting beat, which is how most people lose.

Who sows fear, reaps weapons.

For any new technology there is always controversy and there always some fear associated with it. I think that's just the price of being first sometimes.