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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My problem with most athletic challenges is training. I'm lazy and find that workouts cut into my drinking time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Healthier, perhaps, to find beauty in life and feel it expand inside of us.
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.
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.
As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.
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 many years I thought my job was to go to places where it would be difficult for most of the readers to ever get to. Now, in the more than 20 years I've been doing this, the concept of adventure-travel trips or expeditions by groups has sprung up. The places I went 20 years ago now have adventure-travel trips.
Hot, dry katabatic winds, like the south foehn in Europe, the sharav in the Middle East, and the Santa Ana of Southern California, are all believed to have a decided effect on human behavior and are associated with such health problems as migraines, depression, lethargy, and moodiness. Some scientists say that this is a myth.
I have no problem with the adventure travel movement. It makes better, more sensitive people. If you get people diving on a coral reef, they're going to become more respectful of the outdoors and more concerned with the threats that places like that face and they're going to care more about protecting them than they would have before.
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.
An adventure is never an adventure while it's happening. Challenging experiences need time to ferment, and adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquillity.
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.
