Very few people changed the world by sitting on their couch.

I’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.

Scrabble - The game is available in Braille. That’s a nice fact. This makes me feel better about humanity for some reason. I can’t really explain why.

I know that you should always say yes to adventures or you'll lead a very dull life.

When I went to Israel, it was a little disorienting, because there are so many people who look crazy and were dressed like me. There, I was just one of the apocalyptic crowd.

When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.

Think of negative speech as verbal pollution. And that's what I've been doing: visualizing insults and gossip as a dark cloud, maybe one with some sulfur dioxide. Once you've belched it out, you can't take it back. As grandma said, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. The interesting this is, the less often I vocalize my negative thoughts, the fewer negative thoughts I cook up in the first place.