I never studied writing, but I’d always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
Almost every magazine piece I’ve ever written, I felt like I haven’t done it justice, like it was just a gloss.
Short form media is reductionist by nature.
Once you believe that God is speaking directly to you, there is no discussion.
Heaven, for me, is one focused project – it’s like a weird form of autism.
If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.
There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It’s mostly about random pointless death and misery.
When I start any book, I have no idea what I’m going to do.
If you’re not a feminist, you’re part of the problem.
I love being outdoors, being in the mountains and the desert, and my wife enjoys that too. That’s one of the things that sustain our relationship.
I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.
Common sense is no match for the voice of God.
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies...
It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.
The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.
I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.
Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.
My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards...