Quotes from Jim Harrison

I used to have this illusion that time and remote areas prepare you for the world. Our moms used to think that kind of thing. Well, it doesn't prepare you for the world at all!

How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I've been doing it since I was four.

I work every morning, all morning, sometimes in the afternoons. Then sometimes I hunt in the afternoons - quail, doves, grouse up north - but just to stay alive, because writers die from their lifestyle but also from their lack of movement.

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

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

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

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

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

Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.

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

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.

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

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.

If I can't be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes, I tell my wife I have to take a car trip and collect new memories - I like to drive around at absolute random for weeks on end through the United States and parts of Canada. Or else I feel trapped, like you feel when your life is completely planned for months in advance, and you think you're not getting enough oxygen.

I do have trouble with titles.

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.

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.

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

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

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