Military investigations are designed not to find anyone guilty.

Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.

I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.

When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.

This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.