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

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.

But things are so bad, I feel like I’m going to explode if I don’t do something.

Everything will be art and nothing will be art, because everything, as I believe, already is.

I don't sense an [Barack] Obama party. I think politics is transactional for him.

We do not need to achieve some minimum level or capacity or goodness before God will help - divine aid can be ours every hour of every day, no matter where we are in the path of obedience.

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Take my heart and mold it; take my mind, transform it; take my will, conform it - to Yours, to Yours, to Yours.

Thinking for yourself is still a radical act

I started realizing I have enough history that some of it has been forgotten.

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.

Science has become adult; I am not sure whether scientists have.