Cynthia Kadohata quotes:

I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

Weedflower' was already in the copyediting phase when I heard about the Newbery award, so it didn't really influence my writing of that book, but since then, I have become more aware of having an audience.

I love writing about people on the road.

At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences.

I try to find my deepest, often hidden feelings about what's working and what's not. This is difficult because I do lie to myself without being aware that that's what I'm doing.

For me, books are music for my mind and my imagination. When I am stuck in something I'm writing, I simply read my way out of being stuck. You can never waste time reading.

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

I know a lot about when I was a little girl, because my sister used to keep a diary. Today I keep her diary in a drawer next to by bed. I like to see how her memories were the same as mine, but also different.

Some days I think she was really miserable, because she cried a lot. In a way, I'd had to steel my heart to her crying. You need to steel yourself to a lot of things when someone in your family is really sick.

Watch out for life ... It's harder than it looks.

I have so much respect for people who do blue-collar work because I come from that background myself.

if you hated white people, they would just hate you back, and nothing would change in the world; and if you didn't hate them after the way they treated you, you would end up hating yourself, and nothing would change that way, either. So it was no good to hate them, and it was no good not to hate them. So nothing changed.

The jungle changes a man.

And yet we couldn't leave--it was if the rocks were holding us there. I mean, they were only rocks. But for some reason, those rocks made lonely feel good.

My sister had taught me to look at the world that way, as a place that glitters, as a place where the calls of the crickets and the crows and the wind are everyday occurrences that also happen to be magic.

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

I almost never slept deeply anymore--as soon as she said my name, I always sat up immediately, no matter how tired I was.

you could see the roads crisscrossing over the fields. When cars went by, far away, the beams were so bright they seemed to be ropes of light pulling the cars behind.