117 Quotes by Peter Heller

The albatross hit the top and canted her soft belly to the storm, and made a screaming banked peel-out downwind and over the other side. I don’t know if anyone else on the ship saw her. To me, she was a visitation. Not harbinger or annunciation, but a simple reminder of a wold that worked, that was at home with itself and friends with storm.

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

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

I love to fish almost more than anything.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.