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I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top.

Tim Cahill

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More quotes by Tim Cahill

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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.
Tim Cahill
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Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis.
Tim Cahill
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For me, to find a place that doesn't have an organized tour going to it is becoming more and more difficult. A lot of times it involves danger of a political nature - places where the adventure-travel trips can't go because they can't get any liability insurance.
Tim Cahill
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Healthier, perhaps, to find beauty in life and feel it expand inside of us.
Tim Cahill
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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.
Tim Cahill
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I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.
Tim Cahill
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My concept of drama requires obstacles, and there's no obstacles in comfort.
Tim Cahill
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You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
Tim Cahill
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A constant ongoing joke among the people that I travel with is my absolutely hopeless sense of direction. I'm able to get lost a half an hour from camp. I don't know how I do this.
Tim Cahill
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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.
Tim Cahill
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You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.
Tim Cahill
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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.
Tim Cahill
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I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.
Tim Cahill
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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.
Tim Cahill
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The explorer is the person who is lost.
Tim Cahill
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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.
Tim Cahill
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Right whales, for all their size, are surprisingly athletic. They roll, they slap their flukes, they lift their heads out of the water in a move known as a spy hop. They find playthings and are particularly fond of swimming repeatedly through clumps of seaweed, which slides over them like a feathered boa.
Tim Cahill
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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.
Tim Cahill
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The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.
Tim Cahill
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I take compliments and I take constructive criticism. Not everyone loves you. It's the way you react as a footballer. I use it all to make me play better.
Tim Cahill