You can't be unhappy in the middle of a big, beautiful river.
Jim Harrison
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.
We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.
I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.
Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
The big curse of America, to me, is skinless, boneless chicken breasts. They're banal and relatively flavorless. The rest of the world's trying to get some fat to eat, and we're trying to ban it from our diet.
Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.
My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a fine restaurant, and it's like a mausoleum inside. Good food should be joyful. There should be laughter and chatter, not people sitting there like they're in a funeral-parlor waiting room.
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 my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.
I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.
Success and money can really be quite blinding.
Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.
You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.
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.
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.
Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.
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 hollering at each other. That doesn't work.
I'm outdoors a lot, so I get dark. Guess who gets stopped? I've been pulled over, and they ask, 'Where are you from?' I say, 'Montana.' They say, 'Are you sure? And I say, 'I'm reasonably sure I'm from Montana, but you know, this is a dream life.' You start on this shtick with them and it's fun.
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.'
I don't want to go around like some kind of bleeding giant or whatever, or thinking I'm a big deal, because it doesn't help you do your work. I think people like Hemingway got into an awful lot of trouble that way.
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.
So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.
I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.
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.
Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.
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.
The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.
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?
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.
I'm a time person. It's the one discipline I manage.
The idea is to eat well and not die from it - for the simple reason that that would be the end of your eating.
I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.
I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.
If all I did was pretend I was Wilderness Jimmy, I would go stale. You know, I fish maybe 100 days of the year and bird-hunt, but if I didn't go to Paris once or twice a year, I'd be crazy.
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.
I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.
I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And 'literary artist' - poet and novelist - is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.
I do have trouble with titles.
When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.
If I can't be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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.
Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
