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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Peter Heller

Always

Easy

Stop

" 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. "

" Wanted to write fiction since I was 11, since I first read 'In Our Time' by Hemingway. "

" I just love when the learning curve is steep. And I love being in nature, in the wild. "

" Writing, to me, is like kayaking a river. You are paddling down, and you come to a walled-off canyon, and you make a sharp turn, and you don't know what's around the corner. It could be a waterfall, it could be a big pool. The narrative current carries you. You're surprised, and you're thrilled, and sometimes you're terrified. "

" 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 write a lot of environmental stories. "

" I have two younger sisters, and it was a family full of creativity. "

" Yes, I love poetry, both to read and to write it. A first love. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Peter Heller

Handle

Approach

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Kook means the clueless beginner who paddles his surf board out to the other surfers in the lineup and starts chattering away like it's a cocktail party, completely ignores all the finely-tuned protocols of surf that have developed over decades. "

Peter Heller

Away

Party

" I'm fascinated by characters who are faced with big losses and have to put their lives back together again. "

" The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry. "

" I love to fish almost more than anything. "

" A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan. "

" Huntington Beach is like ground zero for surfers. "

Peter Heller

Beach

Zero

" 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. "

Peter Heller

Will

Year

" 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. "

Peter Heller

Got

Strong

" The great thing about being young and dumb is that you don't know what you can't do. "

" 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. "

" I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative. "

" New Zealand is weird. I mean, it does not seem of this earth, not to me. It really is like something made up. "

Peter Heller

New

Earth

" Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day. "

" 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. "

" Writing 'Dog Stars' was coming home. My spirit just sang. It's what I wanted to do my whole life. "

" The great thing about fiction is that everything you care about ends up going into the book. "