Tim Cahill Quotes

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

Tim Cahill

#2. It was a great place to run red lights, which I count as a fine recreational activity.

Tim Cahill

#3. My idea of a vacation is staying home and doing short day hikes, floating the river and things like that.

Tim Cahill

#4. The hard wind we get around here on the eastern slopes of the Rockies is called a Chinook. It's a katabatic wind and comes from mountains to the west of us and the mountains to the south.

Tim Cahill

#5. You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.

Tim Cahill

#6. Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In 'Pony Blues' and 'Peavine Blues,' he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.

Tim Cahill

#7. No amount of money could make me play for Liverpool, that isn't disrespect to Liverpool or their fans, it's respect for Everton

Tim Cahill

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

Tim Cahill

#9. My first book was called 'Buried Dreams,' about a serial-killer, which was probably about ten years ahead of the serial-killer curve. It was a national bestseller, but it was three years of living in the sewer of this guy's mind.

Tim Cahill

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

Tim Cahill

#11. Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for them to write about.

Tim Cahill

#12. I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top.

Tim Cahill

#13. Stanley Kubrick went with his gut feeling: he directed 'Dr. Strangelove' as a black comedy. The film is routinely described as a masterpiece.

Tim Cahill

#14. The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.

Tim Cahill

#15. In my house, it is always a scramble from paycheck to paycheck.

Tim Cahill

#16. In my life outdoors, I've observed that animals of almost any variety will stand in a windy place rather than in a protected, windless area infested with biting insects. They would rather be annoyed by the wind than bitten.

Tim Cahill

#17. In the sago palms, you'll often find sago beetles which are about the size of your little finger. The Karowai put those on the fire until they're crispy and eat them. They taste a little bit like creamy snails. But compared to sago, the sago beetle is really pretty good.

Tim Cahill

#18. A journey is best measured in friends, not in miles.

Tim Cahill

#19. It won't snow on us," I told my hiking companions, "because I lead a good and virtuous life." "We're dead," Dave Long said.

Tim Cahill

#20. For me, Brett Emerton is the heart and soul of the Australian team. Him signing for Sydney FC, it has to be the biggest catch in the history of Australian football. He's a machine and he's probably the best pro I've ever trained and worked with.

Tim Cahill

#21. Adventure travel existed before I started, I just didn't know it.

Tim Cahill

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

Tim Cahill

#23. Publishing your work is important. Even if you are giving a piece to some smaller publication for free, you will learn something about your writing. The editor will say something, friends will mention it. You will learn.

Tim Cahill

#24. I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.

Tim Cahill

#25. The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.

Tim Cahill

#26. It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.

Tim Cahill

#27. 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.

Tim Cahill

#28. 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.

Tim Cahill

#29. A journey is measured in friends, not miles.

Tim Cahill

#30. 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.

Tim Cahill

#31. For me, to find a place that doesn't have an organized tour going to it is becoming more and more difficult. A lot of times it involves danger of a political nature - places where the adventure-travel trips can't go because they can't get any liability insurance.

Tim Cahill

#32. Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.

Tim Cahill

#33. A constant ongoing joke among the people that I travel with is my absolutely hopeless sense of direction. I'm able to get lost a half an hour from camp. I don't know how I do this.

Tim Cahill

#34. My problem with most athletic challenges is training. I'm lazy and find that workouts cut into my drinking time.

Tim Cahill

#35. Editors, for the most part, don't care 'what' you've done, or how astounding the physical event may have been. You need to write well. Many others are capable of doing what you have done (probably), so you must write better than they ...

Tim Cahill

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

Tim Cahill

#37. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

Tim Cahill

#38. When I read about how 200 people died on a polar expedition, I wonder why they didn't get to know the Inuit people who were around and presumably know something about surviving in the Arctic after living there for thousands of years. Talking to people is a survival mechanism.

Tim Cahill

#39. That's why the words "Let's go!" are intrinsically courageous. It's the decision to go that is, in itself, entirely intrepid.

Tim Cahill

#40. Stanley Kubrick, I had been told, hates interviews. It's hard to know what to expect of the man if you've only seen his films. One senses in those films painstaking craftsmanship, a furious intellect at work, a single-minded devotion.

Tim Cahill

#41. 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.

Tim Cahill

#42. There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place.

Tim Cahill

#43. 'Rolling Stone' had started something called 'Outside,' and since I was one of two people in the office that liked going outside, I was pegged to work on it. The concept of the magazine was simple: literate writing about the out-of-doors. I jumped at the opportunity.

Tim Cahill

#44. 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.

Tim Cahill

#45. I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.

Tim Cahill

#46. The sensual caress of waist deep cold smoke ... glory in skiing virgin snow, in being the first to mark the powder with the signature of their run.

Tim Cahill

#47. An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.

Tim Cahill