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.

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.

That’s why the words “Let’s go!” are intrinsically courageous. It’s the decision to go that is, in itself, entirely intrepid.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.