A journey is best measured in friends, not in miles.
An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.
I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure.
A constant ongoing joke among the people that I travel with is my absolutely hopeless sense of direction. I’m able to get lost a half an hour from camp. I don’t know how I do this.
The explorer is the person who is lost.
I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top.
There’s a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don’t write a boring story about a boring place.
Adventure travel existed before I started, I just didn’t know it.
My idea of a vacation is staying home and doing short day hikes, floating the river and things like that.
Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there’s very little in a literary sense for them to write about.
New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.
Stanley Kubrick went with his gut feeling: he directed ‘Dr. Strangelove’ as a black comedy. The film is routinely described as a masterpiece.
The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.
My concept of drama requires obstacles, and there’s no obstacles in comfort.
My problem with most athletic challenges is training. I’m lazy and find that workouts cut into my drinking time.
The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest – find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.
Publishing your work is important. Even if you are giving a piece to some smaller publication for free, you will learn something about your writing. The editor will say something, friends will mention it. You will learn.
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.
Healthier, perhaps, to find beauty in life and feel it expand inside of us.