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.

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.

You can't understand where someone's going unless you understand where they've been.

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.

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.

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.