Jim Harrison Quotes
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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 do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.
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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'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.
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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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My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.
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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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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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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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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?
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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.
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I've always been intemperate in my affection for food.
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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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Riesling? It smells like an intensive care ward.
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If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.
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There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.
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Success and money can really be quite blinding.
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Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.
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I grew up in an agricultural family, and I never distanced myself from where the food comes from. I think it's quite natural.
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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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Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.
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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.
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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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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.