I had to make a living, so I got happily diverted into writing about expeditions and adventures.

When I got out of college, I had to make a living, and I started writing for magazines, and it felt like the perfect job.

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.
To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

There's always been in my life that tension between living and writing. For me, because I'm so physically exuberant, it was extra hard to sit still at the desk and put in the hours that you need to put in to write.

Writing, to me, is like kayaking a river. You are paddling down, and you come to a walled-off canyon, and you make a sharp turn, and you don't know what's around the corner. It could be a waterfall, it could be a big pool. The narrative current carries you. You're surprised, and you're thrilled, and sometimes you're terrified.

A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.