David Guterson

“Oh, to be young. To still be one's own hero.”

— David Guterson

A literary achievement of the highest order.

— David Guterson

I'm not an urban person.

— David Guterson

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

— David Guterson

Fiction is socially meaningful.

— David Guterson

I think of myself as a really happy person.

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

“Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.”

— David Guterson

You should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart -…

— David Guterson

“One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I've thrown in my…

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task.…

— David Guterson

“To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion—and a horrifying one.”

— David Guterson

“He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly…

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only…

— David Guterson

“The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably. In Japan, she said, a person learned…

— david guterson

“To die, he thought, was to escape passion's grasp, but that was the last thing he wanted. Instead he wished to be…

— David Guterson

We should recognize that schools will never solve the bedrock problems of education because the problems are problems of families, of cultural…

— David Guterson

“Satellites can see your thoughts, but not through rock,' is like something they might say. In John William's case, it was conscious…

— David Guterson

He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there…

— David Guterson

“If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest…

— David Guterson

None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it.…

— David Guterson

“We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is…

— David Guterson

“[Ishmael] listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared…

— David Guterson

“Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po,…

— David Guterson

“The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else. [S]he…

— David Guterson

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter…

— David Guterson

“When I think about John William now, I think about someone who followed through, and then I'm glad not to have followed…

— David Guterson

“He had visited his family the evening before, eaten dinner with Renee and Chris, his grandson, in the pretence that everything was…

— David Guterson

“No one [Islanders] trod easily upon the emotions of another where the sea licked everywhere against an endless shoreline. And this was…

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson

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

— David Guterson