David Guterson Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.
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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.
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I think of myself as a really happy person.
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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.
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When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.
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I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.
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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.
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It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.
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My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.
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I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.
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Fiction is socially meaningful.
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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.
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I'm not an urban person.
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I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.
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Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.
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Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.
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What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.
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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.
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What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.