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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

" 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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I love to fish almost more than anything. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" I always wanted to be a writer. I was writing poetry when I was 6. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I like the drinking-out-of-the-fire-hose approach - you're getting way more than you can handle. "

Peter Heller

Handle

Approach

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

" 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

" 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 write a lot of environmental stories. "

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

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

" I had to make a living, so I got happily diverted into writing about expeditions and adventures. "