KAREN KINGSBURY

I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

You don't have love without sacrifice; you can't have sacrifice without love.

You need to get down among the people who are the dirtiest and dustiest, and the depravity, and you need to see Christ's light shining there.

There were times when I was so sick of talking about the Bible.

I write about true-life type things.

I came to Christ in my early 20s.

You're gifted to do something.

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

I developed a deep sadness for celebrities, a pity that they often are caught in a plastic world that runs too hard and too fast, and that many times that world means destroyed relationships with everyone they know and love.

Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual.

The general market wants what I do.

I can spend 10 to 15 minutes with someone, and they can tell me what they're going through. I may never have gone through that, but I get it on a really deep level.

As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.

You need to have time to really hear God.

My characters are not plastic.

Reader loyalty will stay because I'm not changing.

I'm receiving 300 to 500 letters every week from people telling me that God used my stories to save their marriage or to introduce them to Christ or to heal a relationship that had been broken.

Because love was a light that wouldn't allow darkness to reign in his soul.

You can't base your decisions on anyone's opinion but yours and God's.

Love happens when people forgive.

My parents used to say faith wasn't something you could pretend about. It wasn't real unless it looked like faith and acted like faith.

The truth was this: Love is a decision.

Her eyes held an endless kind of love for him.

Friends don't get jealous of each other or begrudge the other for finding success. They celebrate every victory together.

Life changes, people come and go and seasons never last. Karen kingsbury # Leaving