That's the thing about a book: You're in the public life for a little bit, and then you sort of go away for a little while - several years, in my case - and then you come out again, hopefully.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Well, it's so hard for books to take off. You give years of your life to something that probably won't happen, so when it does, it feels a little... unjust.
I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.
Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back to it, and your life becomes a bit of an interruption. I would love readers to feel like that.
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.
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
So, while I gave up the notions of publishing at that time, I never stopped editing and refining that book. A few years later, in 1987, I thought I had it ready to go out again.
No opposing quotes found.