Michelle Paver Quotes

I wanted to write a very simple story about a boy, a wolf, a girl, a bear and a forest, so I thought I might set it in the past. I didn't realise that it went back to when I was 10: I used to love the Stone Age when I was a kid and wanted to live in it, and I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor, but I didn't remember it.

I like the skill set required to be an outdoorsman - to cook food over fire and to climb rocks without ropes, to move around using nothing but yourself and maybe some rudimentary tools.

I guess what I find interesting is city folk are the least capable of survival of any human being.

The rite of passage of learning to build a fire that will burn all night with one match is not an insignificant one in my husband's family, and I grew up camping and backpacking. I love to camp.

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

Shoes and clothing damage our ability to survive naked in the wilderness.

But I love the idea - whether it's in my work or where I live - exploring new frontier, and I like putting myself in strange places and trying to survive and figure things out and gather up an infrastructure. I like knowing that I could figure out a way to live anywhere.

It's the little details I love. How to fletch your arrows with owl feathers, because owls fly silently, so maybe your arrows will, too. How to carry fire in a piece of smouldering fungus wrapped in birchbark. These are the things which help a world come alive.

Take a trip to the forest and experience the greatness of getting on your knees and picking your own food and going home... and eating it.

I'm the kind of person who, if I were living in another time, if I had to pick any time, I would probably be a pioneer. I just love the simplicity of what it means to work hard with your hands - to eat and survive.

There was a pony named Barbapoppa that I received at the age of five, and he was very mischievous and maybe even devilish. Barbapoppa was the most fabulous first animal I was to have and challenged me much.

We live in such a consumer-based world. Everything we do, someone else has provided for us, so there is something really empowering about knowing that once I have found the right pieces of wood, I can start a fire and keep myself warm and skin an animal to eat and make its skin into leather.

I live in New York, and when you're older and widowed, it's a perfect place because you just don't feel lonely there, and, luckily, I like my own company, too.

I grew up in the Bronx. The Bronx teaches you to survive. It's like, 'Bring it on!'

I was looking for a husband, but meanwhile to survive, I had to work.

I talk to children in schools all over the world, and I've found that both boys and girls are fascinated by how hunter-gatherers manage to survive entirely on what's around them in their environment: trees, rocks, animals and plants.

To experience the northern forest in the raw, I went to northern Finland and Lapland, travelling on horseback, and sleeping on reindeer skins in the traditional open-fronted Finnish laavu. I ate elk heart, reindeer and lingonberries, and tried out spruce resin: the chewing gum of the Stone Age.

I could start a fire from scratch.

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 I had to live on a desert island, and somebody gave me a chicken, there's no way I'd kill it - I'd call it Henry and make it my friend.

In order to survive in a very small tribe, you needed to know how to do lots of things for yourself: how to make your tools, how to get food, and how to make your clothes - things most of us today don't need to know. The only thing I need to survive is to know history.

That callousness that comes from feeling like you have to survive on your own - I really empathized with that.

I go to the wild mountains where I am responsible for myself. Step by step I am making sure that I don't die.

If you look at the movie 'Belly,' I identify with Sincere the most. I am a gangster. I love my lady to death. I'm not in the game for the wrong reasons. I'm not in the game for the glory. I'm in the game to survive so the people that I love could be straight. I'm a highly intelligent individual.

When it came to my childhood - growing up in a single-parent home, often struggling financially - my mother definitely instilled in me and my siblings this strength, this will, to just continue to survive and succeed.