Jim Harrison

I think the trouble with artists or chefs who whine about criticism is that if you love the good reviews, you have to at least read the bad ones.

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

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.

We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can't drink a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Telegraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Luzerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.