Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison
James "Jim" Harrisonwas an American author known for his poetry, fiction, reviews, essays about the outdoors, and writings about food. He is best known for his 1979 novella Legends of the Fall. He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage in spite of their intelligence and some...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 December 1937
CountryUnited States of America
As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.
I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.
When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.
No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.
Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
The days are stacked against what we think we are.
That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?
I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.
All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.
I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.
Zen is the vehicle of reality.
It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.