I am mostly full time dad and my time is mostly at the mercy of an awesome little boy. I write when I can.

My wife and I have always tried to explain to the girls — even when I had to go off on nine-month cruises in the Mediterranean or in the Pacific — why I was doing it, and what it was all about, that I felt that I could contribute to the military.

In the first 33 years of my life which is up until I climbed Everest, I was a very restless and slightly unhappy sort of person. I really didn’t have a great deal of social life, but I’d become very interested in adventurous activities. Perhaps, I was, in some respects something of a loner. But after I got married, that certainly changed my life very considerably, indeed. I found that it was possible to mix having a family with continuing on with adventurous activities, but I think a great deal of that was having a suitable wife. My wife was very, long-suffering. She knew that there were certain things I wanted to do and she was happy that I should do them. She was prepared to put up with considerable periods of being alone with the kids. She, was marvelous, so it made it possible for me to do the things that I wanted to do as well.

I would be able to shoot even more if I didn’t have the promotion and all these kinds of things to do. I would do it like Fassbinder — seven films a year — if I could. Making films is a pleasure for me.

I used to tell Kristina, “I choose to be married to you every day.”

I’m actually suspicious of people who have a lot of friends.

I just lack the basic fact-finding instinct.

Don’t read your reviews. […] Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.) […] Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

Touchstone books….I don’t know. So Long, See You Tomorrow; The Moviegoer; A Fan’s Notes; Alice Munro’s stories.

I’d read Something Happened, by Joe Heller; I’d read “A Fan’s Notes,” by Frederick Exley; and I’d read The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy.