You have to live with your mind your whole life.

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life.

Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.

A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.

I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.

I'm amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don't know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.