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.
— Jim Harrison
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.'
You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.
Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.
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.
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 got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.
Success and money can really be quite blinding.
I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.
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.
I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
I can write anywhere.
I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.
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.
I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.
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.
What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.
Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.
If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.
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.
Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
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.
Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.
Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.
I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.
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.
Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.
Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.
The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.
Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.
I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.
I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.
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've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.
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.
Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.
Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that's very irksome.
I couldn't run a tight schedule, and if you're any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you're trying to help them, but you don't have any time left to write yourself.
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.
I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.
Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
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.
Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.
I do have trouble with titles.
I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.
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.
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.
