Jim Harrison

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

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.

I do have trouble with titles.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.

Whatever I learned reading 'Scientific American,' nothing can finally compete with your own observations.

I couldn't read a screenplay without puking.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

I think the trouble with artists or chefs who whine about criticism is that if you love the good reviews, you have to at least read the bad ones.

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

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

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

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

There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.

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

Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

I dont see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

I don't trust anybody that doesn't do good work. I don't give them any credibility. If they can't write, why should I believe anything they have to say?

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

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

I've always been very much attracted to a character that's actually free.

I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.

My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.

Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.

We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.

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

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

Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that's very irksome.

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

When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.

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.

The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling.

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

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.

Theres something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.

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

I can write anywhere.

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

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

If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

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.

You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.

I work every morning, all morning, sometimes in the afternoons. Then sometimes I hunt in the afternoons - quail, doves, grouse up north - but just to stay alive, because writers die from their lifestyle but also from their lack of movement.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

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

Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot... I've seen all these marriages that failed. Those people are always hollering at each other. That doesn't work.

I've got a poem that's in a lot of international anthologies called 'After the Anonymous Swedish' and I thought, 'Well, I'm a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.' It turned out pretty good.

Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.

Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

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

My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a fine restaurant, and it's like a mausoleum inside. Good food should be joyful. There should be laughter and chatter, not people sitting there like they're in a funeral-parlor waiting room.

I've always been intemperate in my affection for food.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

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

I had a concussion I didn't get over for three years. I think that's why I'm goofy.

The idea is to eat well and not die from it - for the simple reason that that would be the end of your eating.

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.

You can't be unhappy in the middle of a big, beautiful river.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

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

Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.

There aren't any real dumb people in my voices. It's always irritated me about Hollywood dialogue - there's so much dialogue that would just bore a Ford mechanic. This is not how people talk.

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

The person that was closest to me growing up was my sister, who died at 19. She was an incredibly powerful girl, deeply committed to art and literature.

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 rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

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

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

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.

You have to temporarily be the character in order to understand him. It's sort of what they used to call 'shape-shifting.'

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

The reviews are getting better, but they always do, in time, if you're still alive.

I'm outdoors a lot, so I get dark. Guess who gets stopped? I've been pulled over, and they ask, 'Where are you from?' I say, 'Montana.' They say, 'Are you sure? And I say, 'I'm reasonably sure I'm from Montana, but you know, this is a dream life.' You start on this shtick with them and it's fun.

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

We are all naturally xenophobic.

As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'

If all I did was pretend I was Wilderness Jimmy, I would go stale. You know, I fish maybe 100 days of the year and bird-hunt, but if I didn't go to Paris once or twice a year, I'd be crazy.

The big curse of America, to me, is skinless, boneless chicken breasts. They're banal and relatively flavorless. The rest of the world's trying to get some fat to eat, and we're trying to ban it from our diet.

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.