Jim Harrison Quotes

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls.

One of the curious effects of a bad hangover is that you think you're wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything.

I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don't know what.

I can write anywhere.

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.

Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.

Fishing makes us less the hostages to the horrors of making a living.

I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.

When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought

Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.

It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.

So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

We Are All One. When we allow ourselves to become aware of this statement in its purest form, we open the doors to reveal the oneness of being. Using the process of conscious evolution we begin to recognise our true underlying identity, for once we have glimpsed the existence of this realm, we then begin to reveal what it is . . . . our true natural state.

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.

How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.

That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park.

I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody, though we remain sure nonetheless that we had to make the jump.

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

I seek the substantial in life.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

I do have trouble with titles.

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.

The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That's why I ran to the woods.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth

Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

Death steals everything except our stories.

I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.

Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.

The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.