Zitat des Tages von Jon Krakauer:
Everest is not real climbing. It's rich people climbing. It's a trophy on the wall, and they're done... When I say I wish I'd never gone, I really mean that.
As I point out in the very first pages of 'Into the Wild,' I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist.
I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
You get a compound fracture in Colorado where I live, and you can probably be in a hospital within a matter of hours, certainly within a day.
Antarctica is a very alien environment, and you can't survive here more than minutes if you're not equipped properly and doing the right thing all the time.
Why climb? That's a question that baffles me. It perplexes me. I really asked that a lot on Everest. I can't justify it. I can't say it's for a good cause. All I can say is look at the history of exploration: it's full of vainglorious pursuits.
When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
Heaven, for me, is one focused project - it's like a weird form of autism.
Let's not mince words: Everest doesn't attract a whole lot of well-balanced folks. The self-selection process tends to weed out the cautious and the sensible in favor of those who are single-minded and incredibly driven. Which is a big reason the mountain is so dangerous.
Military investigations are designed not to find anyone guilty. And you can't investigate up the chain of command, which is a huge impediment.
I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.