Jim Harrison

“Whatever I learned reading 'Scientific American,' nothing can finally compete with your own observations.”

“I don't trust anybody that doesn't do good work. I don't give them any credibility. If they can't write, why should I believe anything they have to say?”

“His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.”

“You can be in terrible shape, and if you take a three-hour walk through the forest and along the river, you're simply not the same as when you started out.”

“I won't talk or deal with a young writer unless I sense he has utterly given his life over to it. It's a waste of my time. If they don't feel 'called' - why in God's name would you do this?”

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

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

“Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.”

“I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.”

“Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.”

“I've always been very much attracted to a character that's actually free.”

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

“I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.”

“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.”

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

“Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.”

“I grew up in an agricultural family, and I never distanced myself from where the food comes from. I think it's quite natural.”

“As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'”

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

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