Jim Harrison Quotes
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I've always been very much attracted to a character that's actually free.
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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.
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The idea is to eat well and not die from it - for the simple reason that that would be the end of your eating.
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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.
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I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.
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Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
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I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.
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I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
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You can't be unhappy in the middle of a big, beautiful river.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.
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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.
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We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.
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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.
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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.
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If I can't be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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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.
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When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.
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We are all naturally xenophobic.
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I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.
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Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that's very irksome.
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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.