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The sheer diversity of literature in the Bible is one of the secrets of its continuing popularity through the centuries. There is something for all moods and many different cultures. Its message is not buried in religious jargon only accessible to either believers or scholars, but reflects the issues that people struggle with in daily life.

Someone remarked that the newspapers or the news magazines are the same as the psalms except that the names changed in the stories. Maybe you can't understand the psalms without understanding the newspaper and the other way around.

The Psalms, the anthology of the hymns of Israel, are still used by Christians.

The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.

It is heartrending to read the entries in many an old family Bible - the records of suffering, distress, and blasted hopes.

You have to find that place that is very quiet in your head, and anytime I read it, anytime I come across it, my Bible, the first Scripture in there is Psalms 91.

There's no better book with which to defend the Bible than the Bible itself.

The more I come to recognize my story's place in God's grander Story, my once-bewildered questions are turning to psalms of thanksgiving at the wonder that I have been included in what He is doing.

I do not concern myself much with reading long commentary volumes designed to enlarge at length upon that which is found in the scriptures. Rather, I prefer to dwell with the source, tasting of the unadulterated waters of the fountain of truth - the word of God as he gave it and as it has been recorded in the books we accept as scripture.

You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.