A Quote by David Guterson

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.

David Guterson

Quote Topics

Could Fictional Finally Find Fits History Just My Way News Novel Politics Real Real World Return Starts The Real World Totally Way World Writing

Quote Author

David Guterson
American - Novelist
Born: May 4, 1956

What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.

Ruth Ozeki

For morning news, people want to know as they are getting dressed, as they are getting ready to leave [for work], "what has happened in the world overnight?" Morning news is a sure-fire way to find out what that is. I personally love and celebrate the fact that you can go to bed and the world is one way and you wake up and it's totally different.

Gayle King

Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.

Haruki Murakami

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)

Jincy Willett

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

V. S. Naipaul

People are getting too far away from the real-world. Politics is just ridiculous, it's totally dysfunctional.

Temple Grandin

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

Julia Glass

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

Umberto Eco

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

Jacob Burckhardt

The best moment in writing any book is when you just can't wait to get back to the writing, when you can't wait to re-enter that fictional place, when your fictional town feels even more real than the town where you actually live.

Edwidge Danticat

I've always had a real interest in the way that science fiction can portray a world that could be different to our world, which I find a really exciting thought.

Naomi Alderman

I guess one of the most magnificent things a novel can do is to change your perspective on the world, and to give it some sense of wonder, and that's what I find so exciting in writing fantasy, especially fantasy for children. Because already, I think children have a very special and unusual way of seeing the world.

Marie Rutkoski

A lot of people will tell you the first step to starting something new is to have an idea. But to me the first step starts long before that. The first step to acting like an entrepreneur is to look not at the writing on the wall but at the spaces between the writing. It's in the gap between what's being said and what's not being said that entrepreneurs thrive. The way to get going is to find the courage to take your dream out of your head and put it to the test in the real world. Don't just think it; act on it.

Linda Rottenberg

When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.

Carl Jung

The graphic novel? I love comics and so, yes. I don't think we talked about that. We weren't influenced necessarily by graphic novels but we certainly, once the screenplay was done, we talked about the idea that you could continue, you could tell back story, you could do things in sort of a graphic novel world just because we kind of like that world.