Jim Harrison Quotes
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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.
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Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.
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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 can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.
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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.
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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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I'm a time person. It's the one discipline I manage.
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I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.
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I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
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I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.
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Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
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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.
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We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can't drink a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Telegraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Luzerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine.
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Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.
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I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.
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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.
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Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.
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I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.
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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.
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I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
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How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I've been doing it since I was four.
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We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
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Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.