Jim Harrison
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.Collection: Great
I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Pet
I'm afraid that eating in restaurants reflects one's experiences with movies, art galleries, novels, music - that is, characterized by mild amusement but with an overall feeling of stupidity and shame. Better to cook for yourself.Collection: Movies
Food is a great literary theme. Food in eternity, food and sex, food and lust. Food is a part of the whole of life. Food is not separate.Collection: Food
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Travel
Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.Collection: Imagination
I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Diet
If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.
Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.
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.
Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.
You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.
I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.
What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever I learned reading 'Scientific American,' nothing can finally compete with your own observations.
We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.
I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.
I had a concussion I didn't get over for three years. I think that's why I'm goofy.
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?
I couldn't read a screenplay without puking.
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.
I've always been very much attracted to a character that's actually free.
The reviews are getting better, but they always do, in time, if you're still alive.
I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes, I tell my wife I have to take a car trip and collect new memories - I like to drive around at absolute random for weeks on end through the United States and parts of Canada. Or else I feel trapped, like you feel when your life is completely planned for months in advance, and you think you're not getting enough oxygen.
I grew up in an agricultural family, and I never distanced myself from where the food comes from. I think it's quite natural.
I used to have this illusion that time and remote areas prepare you for the world. Our moms used to think that kind of thing. Well, it doesn't prepare you for the world at all!
I'm a time person. It's the one discipline I manage.
I admit to occasionally sharing the financial hysteria of the rest of the country, the urgency to save more for the family in case you can't write any more.
I've always been intemperate in my affection for food.
I don't feel tentative when I start to write. I've usually thought about a novel or novella for several years and created a lot of juice and density and energy by that time so by the time I get ready to go, I just let 'er fling, you know.
I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And 'literary artist' - poet and novelist - is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.
I don't want to go around like some kind of bleeding giant or whatever, or thinking I'm a big deal, because it doesn't help you do your work. I think people like Hemingway got into an awful lot of trouble that way.
If I can't be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can't drink a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Telegraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Luzerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine.
Riesling? It smells like an intensive care ward.
I don't think it matters how fast you write. It's how long you thought about it. I like to think of it as a well filling up. I think about it until the well is full, and then I let go.
I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.