The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.

My concept of drama requires obstacles, and there's no obstacles in comfort.

When you've managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown - either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude - there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free

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.

Healthier, perhaps, to find beauty in life and feel it expand inside of us.

The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.

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.