Quotes by Tim Cahill

Right whales, for all their size, are surprisingly athletic. They roll, they slap their flukes, they lift their heads out of the water in a move known as a spy hop. They find playthings and are particularly fond of swimming repeatedly through clumps of seaweed, which slides over them like a feathered boa.

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

Success

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

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Life

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

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

I have no problem with the adventure travel movement. It makes better, more sensitive people. If you get people diving on a coral reef, they're going to become more respectful of the outdoors and more concerned with the threats that places like that face and they're going to care more about protecting them than they would have before.

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

Success

Hot, dry katabatic winds, like the south foehn in Europe, the sharav in the Middle East, and the Santa Ana of Southern California, are all believed to have a decided effect on human behavior and are associated with such health problems as migraines, depression, lethargy, and moodiness. Some scientists say that this is a myth.

— Tim Cahill

Life

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

— Tim Cahill

Hope

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

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

In 1952, Muddy cut the song 'Rollin' Stone.' It was a nationwide success, and the song echoes down through rock n' roll history. Bob Dylan cut a tribute by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called 'Rolling Stone.'

— Tim Cahill

Success

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

Wisdom

New Orleans is 5 feet below sea level, which means that holes dug in the ground immediately fill with water. Coffins were punctured and sunk with weights, which didn't stop them from floating up out of the cemeteries and down the streets of the French Quarter on stormy nights. The solution was to bury people above ground, in what are called vaults.

— Tim Cahill

Wisdom

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

Life