Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.
Oh, to be young. To still be one’s own hero.
One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I’ve thrown in my lot with love, and don’t know any other way to go on breathing.
If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest – like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably – was out of their hands, beyond.
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.
He didn’t like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran’s cynicism, was a thing that disturbed him all the time.
The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn’t find a way to do it.
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.
To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one’s inner life, one’s philosophy and one’s perspective.
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.
A literary achievement of the highest order.
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 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 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.