The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.
In my house, it is always a scramble from paycheck to paycheck.
You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn’t travel, I would still write.
Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.
The blues style – moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful – developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn’t the case anymore.
The hard wind we get around here on the eastern slopes of the Rockies is called a Chinook. It’s a katabatic wind and comes from mountains to the west of us and the mountains to the south.
My first real writing job was at ‘Rolling Stone,’ so I wrote about rock-and-roll and politics and the like. At the time, I really didn’t know what I wanted to write, and I did a bunch of investigative journalism.
It’s often hilarious to me that I’m writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there’s a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
My first book was called ‘Buried Dreams,’ about a serial-killer, which was probably about ten years ahead of the serial-killer curve. It was a national bestseller, but it was three years of living in the sewer of this guy’s mind.
No amount of money could make me play for Liverpool, that isn’t disrespect to Liverpool or their fans, it’s respect for Everton.
The only use for a knife during a shark attack is pure treachery: Stab your buddy, swim like hell, and hope the munchies take him.
Stanley Kubrick, I had been told, hates interviews. It’s hard to know what to expect of the man if you’ve only seen his films. One senses in those films painstaking craftsmanship, a furious intellect at work, a single-minded devotion.
It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That’s pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In ‘Pony Blues’ and ‘Peavine Blues,’ he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.
For me, to find a place that doesn’t have an organized tour going to it is becoming more and more difficult. A lot of times it involves danger of a political nature – places where the adventure-travel trips can’t go because they can’t get any liability insurance.
I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I’m trying to, I’ll be defeated by it.
In my life outdoors, I’ve observed that animals of almost any variety will stand in a windy place rather than in a protected, windless area infested with biting insects. They would rather be annoyed by the wind than bitten.
In the sago palms, you’ll often find sago beetles which are about the size of your little finger. The Karowai put those on the fire until they’re crispy and eat them. They taste a little bit like creamy snails. But compared to sago, the sago beetle is really pretty good.
For me, Brett Emerton is the heart and soul of the Australian team. Him signing for Sydney FC, it has to be the biggest catch in the history of Australian football. He’s a machine and he’s probably the best pro I’ve ever trained and worked with.
Finally, consider your predicament a privilege in a world so shrunken that certain people refer to it as the ‘global village.’ The term ‘explorer’ has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a faray into the unknown, and a four-year old child, wandering about along in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost.
A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea... Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it. And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.