David Guterson Quotes

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.

The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.

My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area.

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.

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.

What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.

There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

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.

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.

The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it.

I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.

What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.

I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.

Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.

That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty

You should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart - or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this - silence is better.

I think of myself as a really happy person.

I'm not an urban person.

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.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

A literary achievement of the highest order.

I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.

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.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective

I know you'll think this is crazy, but all I want to do is hold you, and I think that if you'll let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away, and never speak to you again.

The best advice on writing I've ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.

The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.

It ate at whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it