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" The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry. "
Peter Heller
Writing
Tell
Poetry
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" 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. "
Peter Heller
Mother
Her
Husband
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Writing
People
History
" I just love when the learning curve is steep. And I love being in nature, in the wild. "
Peter Heller
Just
Learning
Love
" 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
Like
Away
Party
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Heart
Feel
You
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Person
Oil
Writing
" I love to fish almost more than anything. "
Peter Heller
Fish
Almost
Than
" Yes, I love poetry, both to read and to write it. A first love. "
Peter Heller
Love
Poetry
Yes
" I'm fascinated by characters who are faced with big losses and have to put their lives back together again. "
Peter Heller
Who
Together
Losses
" The great thing about fiction is that everything you care about ends up going into the book. "
Peter Heller
Great
Everything
Care
" 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
Us
Year
" 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. "
Peter Heller
River
You
Sometimes
" 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
Me
Strong
" 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
Like
" Writing 'Dog Stars' was coming home. My spirit just sang. It's what I wanted to do my whole life. "
Peter Heller
Home
Stars
Life
" Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day. "
Peter Heller
Going
Loss
Day
" I had to make a living, so I got happily diverted into writing about expeditions and adventures. "
Peter Heller
Writing
Adventures
Got
" I always wanted to be a writer. I was writing poetry when I was 6. "
Peter Heller
Always
Writing
Writer
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Lost
Grandparents
Animals
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Work
You
Life
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Got
Tough
Know
" I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative. "
Peter Heller
Narrative
Great
Always
" Huntington Beach is like ground zero for surfers. "
Peter Heller
Beach
Zero
Like
" I like the drinking-out-of-the-fire-hose approach - you're getting way more than you can handle. "
Peter Heller
More
Handle
Approach
" 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
" The great thing about being young and dumb is that you don't know what you can't do. "
Peter Heller
Dumb
Know
You
" 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. "
Peter Heller
You
Life
Living
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Perfect
College
Job
" A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan. "
Peter Heller
Strong
Environmental
First
" 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. "
Peter Heller
Artist
Time
Mom