If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

It was a life with purpose. And it was also a lot of fun. Fishing is fun. Hiking up mountains is fun. Building a wall out of river rocks dug up from the bottom of a glacial lake is not fun. Not at all. But it does give a work ethic that you can take anywhere in the world.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

I made myself a rule: write out of love. And when you love somebody, you have to tell the truth about who they are - not the cute "truth" in your head of who they are, the one where you did everything right and they did everything wrong.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.