Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
— Jim Harrison
We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.
Sometimes, discomfort is very uncomfortable. Anybody can get occasionally tired of it, and then it can change fast, where it's comfort that disturbs you.
I don't think it matters how fast you write. It's how long you thought about it. I like to think of it as a well filling up. I think about it until the well is full, and then I let go.
Riesling? It smells like an intensive care ward.
If I can't be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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 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 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.
I'm a time person. It's the one discipline I manage.
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.
There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.
When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.
I've always been very much attracted to a character that's actually free.
I couldn't read a screenplay without puking.
I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.
Whatever I learned reading 'Scientific American,' nothing can finally compete with your own observations.
How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I've been doing it since I was four.
Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.
My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.
You have to temporarily be the character in order to understand him. It's sort of what they used to call 'shape-shifting.'
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 and shame. Better to cook for yourself.
I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.
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.
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.
Age focuses you. You are much better concentrated. There's more time when you travel less, don't do book tours, avoid interviews or public appearances. You walk the dogs, fish, hunt, cook and write.
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!
I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.
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.
I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.
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.
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?
Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.
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.
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?
You can't be unhappy in the middle of a big, beautiful river.
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.
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.
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.
The only durable sense of success is if you've followed your calling.
I've always been intemperate in my affection for food.
I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.
I grew up in an agricultural family, and I never distanced myself from where the food comes from. I think it's quite natural.
The person that was closest to me growing up was my sister, who died at 19. She was an incredibly powerful girl, deeply committed to art and literature.
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 reviews are getting better, but they always do, in time, if you're still alive.
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 had a concussion I didn't get over for three years. I think that's why I'm goofy.
We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
