Jim Harrison

“There aren't any real dumb people in my voices. It's always irritated me about Hollywood dialogue - there's so much dialogue that would just bore a Ford mechanic. This is not how people talk...”

“The only durable sense of success is if you've followed your calling.”

“I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.”

“I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in...”

“Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot... I've seen all these marriages that failed. Those people are always holl...”

“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.”

“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'm afraid that eating in restaurants reflects one's experiences with movies, art galleries, novels, music - that is, characterized by mild amusement but with an overall feeling of stupidity...”

“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.”

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

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

“I admit to occasionally sharing the financial hysteria of the rest of the country, the urgency to save more for the family in case you can't write any more.”

“Riesling? It smells like an intensive care ward.”

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

“My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.”

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

“There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.”

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

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

“Between the two dream coasts, we're just called flyover country... If you aren't known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you're dismissed as a regional author.”