Jim Harrison Quotes
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Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.
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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.
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Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.
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Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.
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Whatever I learned reading 'Scientific American,' nothing can finally compete with your own observations.
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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.
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If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.
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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.
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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.
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You have to temporarily be the character in order to understand him. It's sort of what they used to call 'shape-shifting.'
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I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.
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Success and money can really be quite blinding.
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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.
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I've always been intemperate in my affection for food.
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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.
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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.
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Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.
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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.
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I had a concussion I didn't get over for three years. I think that's why I'm goofy.
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Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
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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.
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I can write anywhere.
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I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.
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I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.