A biography for David Gutersonhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.”
“My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.”
“It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.”
“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.”
“I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.”
“When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.”
“I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.”
“I'm not an urban person.”
“I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.”
“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.”
“I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.”
“If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest -- like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably -- was out of their hands, beyond.”
“What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.”
“Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.”