David Guterson

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

Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together.

— David Guterson change

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

— David Guterson time

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.

— David Guterson mind

I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.

— David Guterson stories

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.

— David Guterson success

I think of myself as a really happy person.

— David Guterson self

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

— David Guterson want

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

— David Guterson

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.

— David Guterson world

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

— David Guterson man

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

— David Guterson need

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.

— David Guterson sad

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.

— David Guterson books