Best 88 quotes of Jim Harrison on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

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

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

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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)

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

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