“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“You can’t be unhappy in the middle of a big, beautiful river.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― 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.”
― Jim Harrison
“I like grit. I like love and death. I’m tired of irony.”
― Jim Harrison
“Unlike a lot of writers, I don’t have any craving to be understood.”
― Jim Harrison
“My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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?”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“I can’t stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.”
― Jim Harrison
“Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That’s an easy call.”
― Jim Harrison
“The idea is to eat well and not die from it – for the simple reason that that would be the end of your eating.”
― Jim Harrison
“You can be in terrible shape, and if you take a three-hour walk through the forest and along the river, you’re simply not the same as when you started out.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there’s a major explosion.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“I don’t know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.”
― Jim Harrison
“Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven’t had many complaints.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It’s irrelevant.”
― Jim Harrison
“We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it’s not. It’s completely holographic.”
― Jim Harrison
“Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that’s very irksome.”
― Jim Harrison
“How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I’ve been doing it since I was four.”
― Jim Harrison
“Age focuses you. You are much better concentrated. There’s more time when you travel less, don’t do book tours, avoid interviews or public appearances. You walk the dogs, fish, hunt, cook and write.”
― Jim Harrison
“I’m actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it’s the place I know best.”
― Jim Harrison
“I grew up in an agricultural family, and I never distanced myself from where the food comes from. I think it’s quite natural.”
― Jim Harrison
“I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.”
― Jim Harrison
“If I can’t be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”
― Jim Harrison
“I wrote ‘Legends of the Fall’ in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.”
― Jim Harrison
“We are all naturally xenophobic.”
― Jim Harrison
“New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York – in case you haven’t noticed.”
― Jim Harrison
“I’m not rational enough to be a good journalist.”
― Jim Harrison
“I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.”
― Jim Harrison
“I don’t see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.”
― Jim Harrison
“Yeah, but now suddenly – you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.”
― Jim Harrison
“I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.”
― Jim Harrison
“I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.”
― Jim Harrison
“I do have trouble with titles.”
― Jim Harrison
“Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.”
― Jim Harrison
“I can write anywhere.”
― Jim Harrison
“Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.”
― Jim Harrison
“Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.”
― Jim Harrison
“I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“I write novellas because I don’t like loose sprawling prose.”
― Jim Harrison
“I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.”
― Jim Harrison
“I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it’s about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.”
― Jim Harrison
“Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.”
― Jim Harrison
“Success and money can really be quite blinding.”
― Jim Harrison
“Michigan is two radically different places – the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.”
― Jim Harrison
“I’ve never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.”
― Jim Harrison
“If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.”
― Jim Harrison
“You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.”
― Jim Harrison
“I’ve never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.”
― Jim Harrison
“What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.’”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Whatever I learned reading ‘Scientific American,’ nothing can finally compete with your own observations.”
― Jim Harrison
“We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.”
― Jim Harrison
“I wasn’t taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.”
― Jim Harrison
“I had a concussion I didn’t get over for three years. I think that’s why I’m goofy.”
― Jim Harrison
“I couldn’t read a screenplay without puking.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“I’ve always been very much attracted to a character that’s actually free.”
― Jim Harrison
“The reviews are getting better, but they always do, in time, if you’re still alive.”
― Jim Harrison
“When I write, I don’t like to be around any humans.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“There’s something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“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!”
― Jim Harrison
“I’m a time person. It’s the one discipline I manage.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“I’ve always been intemperate in my affection for food.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“The only durable sense of success is if you’ve followed your calling.”
― Jim Harrison
“Between the two dream coasts, we’re just called flyover country… If you aren’t known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you’re dismissed as a regional author.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don’t revise it once it’s set down.”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Riesling? It smells like an intensive care ward.”
― Jim Harrison
“You have to temporarily be the character in order to understand him. It’s sort of what they used to call ‘shape-shifting.’”
― Jim Harrison
“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.”
― Jim Harrison
“Sometimes, discomfort is very uncomfortable. Anybody can get occasionally tired of it, and then it can change fast, where it’s comfort that disturbs you.”
― Jim Harrison
“I won’t talk or deal with a young writer unless I sense he has utterly given his life over to it. It’s a waste of my time. If they don’t feel ‘called’ – why in God’s name would you do this?”
― Jim Harrison
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