Gary Paulsen Quotes.
A book is a friend. You can never have too many.
The maximum expression of running dogs is the Iditarod. You enter a state of primitive exaltation, and you never return. You’re never normal again.
Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience – waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.
That’s all it took to solve problems – just sense.
I don’t have a favorite author; I have favorite books. ‘Moby Dick’ is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. ‘Moveable Feast’ by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!
My folks were drunks, and I had a rough childhood – really rough – in fact, rougher than I thought about.
Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do , and you must respond as they come.
Look at Inuit clothing. Their stuff still works better than Cabela’s. I’ve made my own parkas, mukluks, footgear, and it is good to 60 degrees below zero. All I did was copy the patterns that came down from the Inuits.
Humans are the big thing that cause damage in life – in war or whatever – and if I can get away from that and into a wilderness situation, I’m OK. You can more or less live on your own merit.
It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank. The only reason I am here and not in prison is because of that woman. I was a loser, but she showed me the power of reading.
A border collie saved me once when I was pinned under a horse in Colorado. And once when I went through the ice, one of my sled dogs saw me go under, and she got the rest of the team, and they pulled me out of 12 feet of water. I think that dogs offer the only form of unconditional love that’s available to humans.
I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.
Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty. In the time I’ve got left, I intend to write artistic books – for kids – because they’re still open to new ideas.
I was raised on farms by people who didn’t have Wal-Mart. They had to make their own sleds, harnesses, clothing, etc.
I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me. The sea.
My parents were brutal to each other, so I slept in the basement by an old coal-fired furnace. I became a street kid. Occasionally, I’d live with aunts or uncles, then I’d run away to live in the woods, trapping and hunting game to survive. The wilderness pulled at me; still does.
If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.
I sail, run dogs, ride horses, play professional poker and tell stories about the stuff I’ve been through. And I’m still a romantic; I still want Bambi to make it out of the fire.
We make a mistake in thinking we own pets – the animals open their lives up and make us a part of them.
In sailing, I single-hand, and I want to do the Horn. The Horn is the maximum expression of sailing, the way the Iditarod is the maximum expression of running dogs. It’s not to write about it; it’s to experience the maximum thing.
Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren’t really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn’t know they were insane.
Years ago, when I was writing westerns, other writers who were friends of mine wanted me to collaborate with them. And it just didn’t work.
