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

The only use for a knife during a shark attack is pure treachery: Stab your buddy, swim like hell, and hope the munchies take him.

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

A lot of the physical flirtation with fear I did early on in my career, when I was a much younger person - stuff I wouldn't do now. But I was very interested in the mechanics of risk and fear in those days. And I found out fear pretty much always feels the same, whether it's doing a rock climb or speaking in front of an audience.

My first real writing job was at 'Rolling Stone,' so I wrote about rock-and-roll and politics and the like. At the time, I really didn't know what I wanted to write, and I did a bunch of investigative journalism.

I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure.