To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher “reality” of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.
I know you’ll think this is crazy, but all I want to do is hold you, and I think that if you’ll let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away, and never speak to you again.
That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.
When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.
I’m a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.
What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.
We should recognize that schools will never solve the bedrock problems of education because the problems are problems of families, of cultural pressures that the schools reflect and thus cannot really remedy.
The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.
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.
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.
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 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.
My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.
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.
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.
You should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart – or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this – silence is better.
Post-modernism is dead because it didn’t address human needs.
I’m not an urban person.
Fiction is socially meaningful.
What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don’t feel required to grasp all the time.