Jim Harrison quotes:

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

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.

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.

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

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

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 did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

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

Perhaps when we die our names are takenfrom us by a divine magnet and are freeto flutter here and there within the bodies of birds.I'll be a simple crowwho can reach the top of Antelope Butte.(From: Hard Times)

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.

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing each other out. We set this house on fire, forgetting that we live within. (from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)

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.

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

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

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

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

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

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

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

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

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

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

As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.

One of the curious effects of a bad hangover is that you think you're wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

In Ecuador the Indian mate was too poor to buy Polaroid glasses but he saw the caudal fins of marlin long before my perfect eyes noticed anything. Benny played pool as if the cue stick emerged from his body. Not my alcohol & geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn't have loved her at gunpoint."

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

The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.

I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed the aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

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

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

Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

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

The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling.

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

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.

I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North

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

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

The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth

Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

In a life properly lived, you're a river,

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

Death steals everything except our stories.

Fishing makes us less the hostages to the horrors of making a living.

Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.

I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don't know what.

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

We Are All One. When we allow ourselves to become aware of this statement in its purest form, we open the doors to reveal the oneness of being. Using the process of conscious evolution we begin to recognise our true underlying identity, for once we have glimpsed the existence of this realm, we then begin to reveal what it is . . . . our true natural state.

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.

We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.

I was a dog on a short chain / and now there's no chain.

You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can't stop it.

We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.

I remember my grandfather telling me how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape the aloneness.

A poet must discover that it's his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.

It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That's why I ran to the woods.

Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.

I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.

What cannot be said, will get wept.

Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.

I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody, though we remain sure nonetheless that we had to make the jump.

My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.

It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.

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.

The wife picked out ceramic tile for floor covering, not realizing that cost was determined by square foot, not square yard like carpet. Thinking the price was plenty reasonable, she had an extra room of tile ordered for installation. When the bill arrived, it was staggering. She and her husband began a fight that continued all through the construction job. They ended up divorced, but not until she had broken every window.

I can write anywhere.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.

All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

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

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

We are all naturally xenophobic.

Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

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

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

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

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

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.

That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park.

I do have trouble with titles.

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

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

I seek the substantial in life.