Quote

Many things I might not write today because I no longer believe them, but I wouldn't change them, since I believed them at the time.

I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.

When I write, I talk about stories and things that are happening in my life. I come from the church. There was a time in my life when I actually had that transformation and relationship with God.

When I first started, everything happened at once. I became religious, my musical career took off, I got married, I had kids, and all that happened within the course of a year. I had an excitement about this newly found faith, and so I was writing about that in a very evident kind of way.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.

I was just fascinated with how everyone else in the world lived, and I was interested in telling their story.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

Your belief system tends to be a function of how you were raised. Being raised in the Midwest and in a relatively conservative household, my views were shaped by my upbringing, by my Christian faith.

When did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change?