Max Lucado Quotes

Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author in the world. I love him so much. There's one book that informs me more than The Road - it's called Suttree. That book is a huge influence on me. I'm not smart enough to emulate him, but he inspires me. He never infiltrates my writing directly. He writes incredibly intelligently about people that are marginalized.

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

I really enjoyed reading the writings of Fredrick Buechner, I havent read anything by him in probably a decade but about 20 years ago I read four or five books of his and it helped me.

As a speaker, I can inspire people to change but as a writer I can guide people to change. That's why books are so important. As a pastor, though, I can be a part of creating the change the world so desperately needs.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.

The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.

The best book of the year, Grobel's writing is quite marvelous. The Hustons reads vividly, just like one of John Huston's great films.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.

I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book, Max on Life; for many it just never gets published. All I did was collect a few of the questions I've been asked through the years, write up a brief response and put them in this publication.

All my books come out of sermons, and I'm really a pastor who writes rather than a writer who pastors.

By about the sixth romance I knew I wasn't in exactly the right place. I liked writing action. And I wanted to write a book with a little more edge than I was allowed in romance.

I think I must write a book. It has been my cherished dream and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task.

I work in theology and Christian books all day long, when Im studying, so its just kind of nice to pick up something different. The books that have influenced me, theres not just one book that was a watershed, although Mere Christianity was as much as any.

Kids love to be silly, they love to laugh, so I think it was natural for my kids to like the sort of books that I write - and it's the only kinds of books I'm capable of writing.

I understand that what I am to do is to be a bridge between the people who would never set foot in a church in their entire lives and people who would like to get them there. So I write books that Christians can give to their non-Christian friends that they will actually read.

I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.

I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.