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

David Guterson

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David Guterson
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: May 4
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Best
Ever
Wells
Well
Take
Consuming
Writing
Received
Seriously
Advice

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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.
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Fiction is socially meaningful.
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You should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart - or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this - silence is better.
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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.
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My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.
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I'm not an urban person.
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Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.
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What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.
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I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.
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There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. . . . Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire human beings must act on reason.
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accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.
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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.
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I think of myself as a really happy person.
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He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran's cynicism, was a thing that disturbed him all the time.
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The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.
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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.
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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.
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We should recognize that schools will never solve the bedrock problems of education because the problems are problems of families, of cultural pressures that the schools reflect and thus cannot really remedy.
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To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher reality of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.
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What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.
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