Jan Karon

“I really care about my readers. I care about anyone who reads my books.”

“It was a wonderful life. To have a stage play right in this room, with real people acting real parts.”

“So here is what my advice would be: If God has given you a dream, you'd better get cracking because He wants you to use it. That's why He gives them to us in the first place.”

“Lord, make me a blessing to someone today.”

“This is a gift that God has given me. I'm not smart enough to write for everybody, but it's the love in these books that comes from Him and goes out to my reading audience. I'm forever grateful for that. It's a privilege.”

“Well, I think some people are very happy in retirement. And in a year and a half I'm going to see how happy I feel in retirement. I'm just going to not work quite so hard, but I'll continue to write as long as God gives me breath.”

“Let me say that I absolutely loved writing 'A Common Life,' because it was a book about love.”

“While most people took family for granted, he [Father Tim] took it for grace.”

“Professor Morgan had called [Dooley] 'a lad of few words.' That wasn't true. There were words spilling around in him all the time. Too many words. His problem was organizing them.”

“There was a lot of brokenness in my family. Let's just say that I was raised by my grandparents.”

“In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“I can't say I have any confidence in confidence. I have confidence that God is with us in all things, both tender and tough.”

“... for fog was merely a cloud that wasn't too smitten with itself to visit terra firma.”

“I remember the first time I held my book, my first book in my hands. I cannot tell you how it moved me.”

“I've put everything I had and I've given my readers 120 percent, and that's the truth.”

“Why can't life always be lived under the stars,' she said, 'with great music and family and friends?”

“My grandmother influenced me so deeply.”

“There are so many people who don't know small towns exist. When I write, I want to give my readers two things: one is a sense of consolation, and two, I want to make them laugh.”

“For a very long time, I wrote a book a year, and was eager and willing to do it, to put bread on the table, to have my work out there. Now I must write a book every two years, and that's never enough time, either.”

“My life is extremely full and wretchedly busy, and I feel that while my life drains energy from my work, my work in turn drains energy from my life. The result is, I am always playing catch-up spiritually. That is my thorn.”