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 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.

The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.

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

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.

There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. . . . Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.

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

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

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

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

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

To reach the pinnacle of success, you have to cross the treacherous valleys of failures and discontent.

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.

Is that a professional bread bowl?

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul.

The works of the creative spirit last, they are essentially imperishable, while the world-stirring historical activities of even the most eminent men are circumscribed by time.

Prune - prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

The concept of a value-free science is absurd.