Jim Harrison Quotes

As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.

A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.

It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

Perhaps when we die our names are takenfrom us by a divine magnet and are freeto flutter here and there within the bodies of birds.I'll be a simple crowwho can reach the top of Antelope Butte.(From: Hard Times)

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?

I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.

The wife picked out ceramic tile for floor covering, not realizing that cost was determined by square foot, not square yard like carpet. Thinking the price was plenty reasonable, she had an extra room of tile ordered for installation. When the bill arrived, it was staggering. She and her husband began a fight that continued all through the construction job. They ended up divorced, but not until she had broken every window.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

In a life properly lived, you're a river.

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.

Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing each other out. We set this house on fire, forgetting that we live within. (from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)

I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.

Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it.

I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed the aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.

We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

I couldn't run a tight schedule, and if you're any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you're trying to help them, but you don't have any time left to write yourself.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

What cannot be said, will get wept.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.