Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.

I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.

The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.

Early on I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included.

You can't say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it's just what the deadbeat ordered.

My life was the best omelette you could make with a chainsaw

I may be the wrong person for my life.

Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

An undisturbed river is as perfect as we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity.

It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.

The only way around it is to stay with one guy forever." But does forever have a built-in ending...?

On painting and fighting looke aloofe. [On painting and fighting look aloof.]

The best songs just come unasked for. You don't have to think about them. Summer is a good time for songs.

Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.

I'm not the same person that I used to be.

Communication is my thing.

My mother raised me to be a writer.

To be born again means that we must be changed from a negative to a positive self-image - from inferiority to self-esteem, from fear to love, from doubt to trust.

My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.