Tim Cahill Quotes

“A journey is best measured in friends, not in miles.”

— Tim Cahill

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

— Tim Cahill

“Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis.”

— Tim Cahill

“Finally, consider your predicament a privilege in a world so shrunken that certain people refer to it as the 'global village.' The term 'explorer' has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a faray into the unknown, and a four-year old child, wandering about along in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost.”

— Tim Cahill

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

“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

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

A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea ... Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it. And we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.

— Tim Cahill

“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

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

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

— Tim Cahill

“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

“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

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

“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

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

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

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

— Tim Cahill

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

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

— Tim Cahill

“As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.”

— Tim Cahill

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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”

— Tim Cahill

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

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

— Tim Cahill

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

— Tim Cahill

“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

“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

“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.”

— Tim Cahill

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“A journey is measured in friends, not miles.”

— Tim Cahill

“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

“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

“My concept of drama requires obstacles, and there's no obstacles in comfort.”

— Tim Cahill

“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

“It occurred to me that for a long time I tried not to write about my own backyard and my home. I suppose I was selfishly keeping it to my self. And in doing so, I was never able to get out into this incredible wilderness area - by the way, I live right at the edge of the most incredible wilderness area probably in the northern hemisphere.”

— Tim Cahill

“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

“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