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
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.
The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That's why I ran to the woods.
That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.
Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.
How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.
No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.
I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.
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 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.
Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls...
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.
Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.