Nick Bantock Quotes

I am endlessly busy, bringing up five young kids, and trying to keep up with the three older ones. I still spend most of my life driving car pools.

I have been juggling so many roles. I am a mother, too. I have three sons to take care of. I don't even know how I manage to pull it off sometimes.

I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.

My life often feels like a whirling dervish of kids, writing, speaking, and pastoral ministry.

I am in awe of women who have full family lives and seem to work round the clock in the 24/7 news cycle.

I'm taking one thing at a time. With the children and launching my solo career it would drive me to a nervous breakdown if I tried to organise a wedding on top of that.

I have a big life, a small child, I work, I do a lot of things, so I'm often playing catch-up with what's current.

I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.

Housekeeping is incredibly difficult with three kids. I'm trying to be more relaxed. You'll go insane if you try to have a picture-book house.

On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do that and teach and raise a kid and paint the house.

It was the case for a number of years that I was doing a book a year, but that was back when I was part-time teaching - and since 1991, I've been a parent, so that cuts into the time!

I honestly wondered how on earth I would manage to combine work and motherhood.

I wrote my first novel when my daughter was about six months old.

It's hard to balance work and family.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

Motherhood has relaxed me in many ways. You learn to deal with crisis. I've become a juggler, I suppose. It's all a big circus, and nobody who knows me believes I can manage, but sometimes I do.

Just because you have kids doesn't mean to say you need time off. I have a lot of time off anyway. If I'm promoting my book, like, for the next two weeks, I'm flat out. But then I'm off again. And when you've got the next product, it's the same; you just condense it into a couple of weeks.

Of course having a baby derails the writing process for some time. And I will be the first to say that I have essentially no social life, because there's just nothing left after being a mom, professor, and writer. I used to be big into rock climbing. No more. A lot falls by the wayside.

There are all these things I want to do when I don't have to finish a book. But I have to keep writing because I keep having children.

Being a writer is great, and being a parent is great, and I hate Marching Band.

When you finally have kids, you realize how selfish you are. I think we are naturally selfish beings. When you have kids, that can kind of be a shock at first. I think just trying to make time for yourself is very hard. Especially now that I have 3, finding that time can be very difficult.

I have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there's such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can't imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don't believe there is room for all of it. I really don't.

There's the chaos surrounding the practical day-to-day - playdates, doctors' appointments, packing and unpacking, and organizing mealtimes.

I'm moderating one of the presidential primary debates right after I've had a baby. I'm sitting in a dirty closet on the floor behind the auditorium where this debate is taking place between Obama, Hillary Clinton, and I'm pumping breast milk... twenty minutes before I'm going on.

I will say I highly recommend, if you want to write a book also, have a child in the midst of that process because it will really force you to organize your time.