Top 55 Jim Harrison Quotes

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.’

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.

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.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

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

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

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

I do have trouble with titles.

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

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.

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 think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don’t revise it once it’s set down.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

We are all naturally xenophobic.

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

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.

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.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

There’s 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.

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.

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

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

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

If I can’t be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It’s irrelevant.