“I go surfing, which isn’t so much an inspiration as something that clears away the many impediments to inspiration. I don’t think about writing while I’m in the water. I give myself over completely to the sublunary experience of weather, water, and waves.
It’s often cold—the best season here is winter—and the ocean is not always hospitable. In real surf you confront your fears and recognize your limits. Your awareness is total and local; you can only ride the wave you're on, not the many wave-pictures you carry around in your head. I never come out of the water with an idea for a story or a solution for a narrative problem. Surfing is useless that way. But what it does for me—and this part is invaluable—is clean my mental clock. In essence, it reminds me, down to my bones, that I’m only a single human being on the planet earth, a link in a human chain, itself an infinitesimal link in the great chain-mail fabric of the universe. My many anxieties about time and significance dissolve, and I can get to work.”
—Antoine Wilson, author of Panorama City (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)