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

When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book, to gather your comparisons from the stuff particular to that world - be they king salmon and aviation fuel, or pot roasts and spatulas.

Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want to disappoint them. Even though was I was pretty committed to disappointing everybody else.

After the age of seven, I began living between my dad in Alaska and my mother in Baltimore. Every three or four months, I would fly the 5,000 miles between the two. And having grown up in Alaska, Baltimore was astonishing.

Most dreams are also part reality (otherwise we wouldn’t believe them), and reality happens to be a condition that gives you plenty of chances through your life to rise to - no, soar through - the occasion.

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.

Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions.