Quotes from Peter Heller

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

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

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.

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

Huntington Beach is like ground zero for surfers.