Quotes from David Guterson

For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.

The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably. In Japan, she said, a person learned not to complain or be distracted by suffering. To persevere was always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy, and one's perspective. It was best to accept old age, death, injustice, hardship – all of these were part of living

He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.

I'm an American,' Kabuo cut in. 'Just like anybody. Am I calling you a Nazi, you big Nazi bastard? I killed men who looked just like you - pig-fed German bastards. I've got their blood on my soul, Carl, and it doesn't wash off very easily. So don't you talk to me about Japs, you big Nazi son of a bitch.

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

today and in a good winter mood, someone not subject to seasonal affective disorder, someone with a generous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had.

I think of myself as a really happy person.

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

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

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

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

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.