Quotes from Jim Harrison

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.

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

The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed.

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.

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

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

If you added it up, without her there was nothing--but with her even the simplest of gestures of walking a bird dog in the desert, or selecting the ingredients for a meal for two rather than one took on an ineffable charm. (from the novella, Revenge )

It's very difficult to look at the World and into your heart at the same time. In between, a life has passed.

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

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.

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

Everyday I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.

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

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

I don't think it matters how fast you write. It's how long you thought about it. I like to think of it as a well filling up. I think about it until the well is full, and then I let go.

Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.

Food is a great literary theme. Food in eternity, food and sex, food and lust. Food is a part of the whole of life. Food is not separate.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

I seek the substantial in life.

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

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

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.