Gary Paulsen Quotations

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.

School didn't work for me. I hated it.

Adults are locked into car payments and divorces and work. They haven't got time to think fresh.

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 owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

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.

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.

Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.

Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do , and you must respond as they come.

We make a mistake in thinking we own pets - the animals open their lives up and make us a part of them.

A book is a friend. You can never have too many.

Read like a wolf eats.

Books make me feel safe. Books make me feel normal.

I tried to contain myself... but I escaped!

He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that--it didn't work.

Personal inspection at zero altitude. The stories come from my life - if not my own experiences, then about topics and subjects that interest me.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

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.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as prey—it is a lessening thought—but the truth is that in our arrogance and so-called knowledge we forget that we are not unique. We are part of nature as much as other animals, and some animals—sharks, fever-bearing mosquitoes, wolves and bear, to name but a few—perceive us as a food source, a meat supply, and simply did not get the memo about how humans are superior. It can be shocking, humbling, painful, very edifying and sometimes downright fatal to run into such an animal.

I've been reading and researching various aspects of history - Dickens' London, Nelson's sea battles, Magellan's nautical explorations, the weapons and battles and key figures of the American Civil War - for most of my life. I pick up a book here or there or see a documentary or talk with an expert in the subject, and my curiosity about the one area of study and discovery always leads to another.

I read like a wolf eats. I read myself to sleep every night.

She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time. And she was wonderfully unhinged.

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.

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.

I am happiest in the brush and by myself - whether that's the woods of northern Minnesota or the wilds of Alaska behind a dogteam, picking through the foothills of the mountains by my ranch in New Mexico on horseback, or on the ship of my sailboat on the Pacific - so I guess it made sense to me that both Brian and Samuel would find their challenges and adventures, if that's what you call them, in the woods.

And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.

He could not play the game without hope; could not play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now...He was alone and there was nothing for him.

He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.

This is going to be murder," Fransic whispered to Mr. Trimes. "Pure murder." "I'm glad to see your confidence returning, Mr. Tucket. Just a few minutes ago you were ready to give up. Now you're talking about killing him." "I meant it the other way." "Oh.

The person who reads can bail, but the person who doesn't fails.

When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and the self-pity had accomplished nothing.

That's all it took to solve problems - just sense.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.

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.

Running with dogs is like dancing with winter

...this beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath...