Jim Harrison Quotes

Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?

I can write anywhere.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

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

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

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

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

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

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

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

I seek the substantial in life.

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

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

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

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

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

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

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

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

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.

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

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

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.

I do have trouble with titles.

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

I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

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

I prefer the skylineof a shelf of books.

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?

Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.

She wasn't trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.

Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery" ~ Snarky comment of Clive from "The River Swimmer" (pg 47)

You don't have to become what you already are, which is a relief.

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

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

Wherever we go we do harm, forgivingourselves as wheels do cement for wearingeach other out. We set this houseon fire, forgetting that we live within.(from "To a Meadowlark, " for M.L. Smoker)