 My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area. |
| What sustains me is to be with my family and to write. |
| 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. |
| Fiction is socially meaningful. |
| Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs. |
| 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. |
| It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me. |
| What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time. |
| 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 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 became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block. |
| I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that. |
| 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. |
