Words matter. These are the best Tim Cahill Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest – find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.
My idea of a vacation is staying home and doing short day hikes, floating the river and things like that.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
For many years I thought my job was to go to places where it would be difficult for most of the readers to ever get to. Now, in the more than 20 years I’ve been doing this, the concept of adventure-travel trips or expeditions by groups has sprung up. The places I went 20 years ago now have adventure-travel trips.
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.
You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn’t travel, I would still write.
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.
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.
The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.
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.
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.
