David Guterson Quotes

One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind.

The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That's behind me now.

I've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

I write in a rush of memory.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

The answer scrawled on a blank page in a daily newspaper, was conceived whilst aboard a ferry.

Some guys leave a place after a long time, and they're bitter. Not me.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I didn't realize I wanted to write about D.C. until after 2000. Even though I was a comedy writer, I stayed away from that subject on purpose. It took attaining some distance and perspective.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.

The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.

What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.

If you are writing something, you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject, and at the same time, you have to have a connection.

I like to write about wherever I happen to be.

I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that.