Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices.

I think of myself as a really happy person.

Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.

I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.

The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.

Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.

There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.

I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.

What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together.

I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.

I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.

I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years.

I'm not an urban person.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had.

I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.

Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Playing to me, in those years, sounded like a house on fire.

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

Now in its third year in office, the Obama Administration has never championed the cause of human rights. Its slow reaction in June 2009 to the stealing of the election in Iran and the birth of the 'Green Movement' there, and its delay in backing the rebellions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, are evidence of this problem.

It's a bit unfair to accuse Obama of dividing the nation when the facts show that it already is.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I will never apologize for having a life.

By presenting a faithful and honest record of my experience as a mother, I hope to show both my readers and my children how truth can redeem even what you fear might be the gravest of sins.

The loneliest you will get is in the most public of arenas: You will go to a place and end up in the smallest compartment possible, because it's a distraction to everybody, and you end up not getting to enjoy it like everyone else.

The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them.

I hate labels; the problem is that if you say you're one thing, it's hard for people to imagine you as something else. Music is way more complicated than that.

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.

Most agree, whatever their party political position, that the West can and should open its agricultural markets more fully to the products of the poorer countries of the globe. They are agricultural societies that need our markets more than our charity.