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.

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.

There are two sides to every question.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you're dealt?

If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.

Did you hear that? I didn't hear anything. Put that question another way.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.

The real question isn't whether you love your kids or not, but how well you are able to demonstrate your love and caring so that your children really feel loved.

There is no question that everybody who works in show business is lucky because of the number of people who wish they where working in show business.

A single question can be more influential than a thousand statements.

He said there is 80 of us, ready to come down and the next thing I knew is that Jo Brown dashed in and said your family has already moved and you have to move, the boat is ready to take you out. I didn't have time to ask, even ask a question.

So begins a question which has of late become more and more urgent: what is the relation of aesthetics to politics?

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

There's another issue here - and I have some limits as to what I can say - but there's some real question as to the viability of the chemical masks, the protective gear used by our soldiers.

This is largely the methodology I've used throughout my career - that is, starting with a question as to what might be the properties of a set of compounds that could be invented which were unusual and unpredictable. Many times I've felt a bit like Columbus setting sail.