Karen Hesse Quotes

The things I wanted to be when I was a kid were an archeologist, because of dinosaur bones; a garbage man, because they got to ride on the side of the trucks; and a writer.

The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.

I remember when I was 12, talking with my friends about what we wanted to do with our lives, astronauts, forensic detectives, all these different jobs. And the only thing I could think was an actor.

Growing up, I wanted to be a journalist. I was in love with Lisa Ling, who's a broadcast journalist and who travels the world. I used to read all of her articles and watch her when she'd go to China or South Africa or Australia. I thought that was the coolest job because she got to travel and tell people's stories.

No young kid growing up dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete or a forest ranger The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welchs of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values.

In my fifth-grade yearbook - it's right up there on the top shell - the last page says, "What about your future?" and under my name, it says, "When I grow up, I would like to be either an actor, a radio announcer, an impersonator or a comedian."

Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'

I don't speak English, so I cannot foresee a career in Hollywood. But I do see myself more and more as an actress rather than a dancer.

My career as a magazine writer was largely prefaced on the idea of curiosity, to go on adventures and weasel my way into the lives of people that I admire.

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

I'm not your expert on Africa or animals or whatever. I'm not a travel writer or maker of documentaries. I was someone who doesn't know very much, trying to communicate.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that's rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, 'What if I wandered into this writer's people here?' If you've done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can't buy.

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.

I write about all manner of things: a guy fighting aliens in the New York State Library, Antarctica, Inca civilization in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and people often ask me, where do I get these ideas from? They come from reading widely, watching a lot of documentaries, and increasingly, as I was able to, travelling around the world.

'The Searcher,' as the title suggests, is about someone in search of something, and I have always loved quest stories and so was drawn to writing one myself.

I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, 'Wait, I was there.' That is one of the great advantages of having wandered around the world and lived in so many places and met such fascinating people.

I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.'

Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.

I'm always looking for the potential mystery in everything; I can't imagine writing about anything else.

I know what it's like to be genuinely intrigued and compelled by a story and to have a sense that there's an adventure to be had and a film to be conjured.

When you start a scene, and you don't really know where you're going to go, that's a roller-coaster.

Whether it's in America, Quebec, or France, if I can tell a story that takes me out of my comfort zone, then I'm surfing.