Fiction Is Socially Meaningful.

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.

Writers Shouldn’t Underestimate The Difficulty Of What They’re Doing, And They Should Treat It With Great Seriousness. You’re Doing Something That Really Matters, You’re Telling Stories That Have An Impact On Other People And On The Culture. You Should Tell The Best Stories You Can Possibly Tell And Put Everything You’ve Got Into It.

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.

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.

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.