Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I write a lot of environmental stories.
I love to fish almost more than anything.
I want to be two people at once. One runs away.
Huntington Beach is like ground zero for surfers.
Dont pretend to be that small, you are not that great!
Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it.
Yes, I love poetry, both to read and to write it. A first love.
I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.
Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late.
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
I have two younger sisters, and it was a family full of creativity.
Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.
Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.
I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative.
The great thing about being young and dumb is that you don't know what you can't do.
To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.
I just love when the learning curve is steep. And I love being in nature, in the wild.
Wanted to write fiction since I was 11, since I first read 'In Our Time' by Hemingway.
The great thing about fiction is that everything you care about ends up going into the book.
I had to make a living, so I got happily diverted into writing about expeditions and adventures.
I like the drinking-out-of-the-fire-hose approach - you're getting way more than you can handle.
Writing 'Dog Stars' was coming home. My spirit just sang. It's what I wanted to do my whole life.
It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.
The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry.
I'm fascinated by characters who are faced with big losses and have to put their lives back together again.
New Zealand is weird. I mean, it does not seem of this earth, not to me. It really is like something made up.
Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day.
I got out of Iowa all set to be a poet and a novelist, but you know what? It's really tough to make a living as a poet.
When I got out of college, I had to make a living, and I started writing for magazines, and it felt like the perfect job.
A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.
Surfing is a life path. You have to really commit... You have to let go and have faith that it's gonna work out when you take off.
My dad's wife, my stepmom, is a serious painter. My dad also paints. My mother is a brilliant sculptor, and her husband is a sculptor.
I write a thousand words a day, and I always stop in the middle of a scene or thought, and it makes it easy to pick up on the next day.
Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.
All my journalism, all my books are first person, and it's all memoir. Even when I'm writing about the oil spill in the Gulf, it's all first person there.
Loss is universal. I've lost grandparents that I dearly adored, lost animals that were like brothers to me. Many of us have gone through terrible breakups.
She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.
Writing nonfiction, you're responsible to posterity, to history, to other people because the events happened, and you feel responsible to record them as they happened.
I don't know if we will really have a doomsday for human beings, but if we did, to me, it wouldn't be an unjust outcome, given how many species we're taking with us every year.
You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace.
There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.
I wrote strong advocacy stories, and when I got to fiction, I made a deliberate effort to leave that behind and enter a country where I had no ax to grind, no advocacy issues that I was carrying with me.
Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.
Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.
How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.
With fiction, I felt like I could bring to bear my full imagination, my entire heart, and so you feel very vulnerable. It's not your physical life, but it's everything else, so it felt like a lot was at stake.
I remember the cover of this one L'Amour book showed a guy on horseback, leading a pack horse across a creek in the snow. Something about that cover - all I wanted to do was drift the high lonesome on horseback.
There's always been in my life that tension between living and writing. For me, because I'm so physically exuberant, it was extra hard to sit still at the desk and put in the hours that you need to put in to write.
My dad was a copywriter on Madison Avenue at the same time as the TV show 'Mad Men' is set. My mom raised the kids and was a scholarship coordinator at a school. More importantly, dad was a writer and my mom an artist.