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.

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.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

So many people have said that to me, that what they really like about Alex is what she brings out in Marissa, and what this situation brings out in her, a hint of happiness and another side to her character.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.