Thomas McGuane is a renowned novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and fly fishing Hall of Famer with a career spanning over four decades. As an avid angler, Tom McGuane has written extensively on fly fishing and the outdoor lifestyle. If you’ve never read any of his work, you should.
For what it’s worth, here is a compilation of some of Thomas McGuane’s quotes on fly fishing. Enjoy!
“I’ve been fly fishing for nearly half a century. It’s so embedded in my circadian rhythms. I wouldn’t know how to live without it.”
“Fly fishing and writing are remarkably similar. There’s something intuitive and exploratory about both, and you have to work for those rare moments of clarity if you’re going to be effective at either.
“I wish every outdoors person would understand that there should be some higher reality connected with the things we like to do. If you fish, there’s an implied responsibility to care for the environment.”
“Fly fishing is not a sport.”
“Are all fishermen liars? Every last one of them. There’s a kind of euphoria triggered by contemplating fishing experiences that invariably leads to inflation.”
“I believe there’s a universal language shared by anglers around the world, a physical language that comes from a very deep part of our human history.”
“For me, fly fishing is the road to a nature-based spirituality. If I was a more poetic person, I might be able to do it without a fishing rod. But I have to have a game to play.”
“Years ago, a great Florida flats fisherman came to visit and I took him to the Yellowstone. I made one cast and caught a five-pound brown. I made a second cast and caught another five-pound brown. Then I said, ‘Okay, you try the pool.’ He started to wade out, stopped, turned around, and said, ‘How often does that happen?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s never happened before.'”
“When I go fishing, I want to fish.”
“Catch-and-release fishing doesn’t mean we’re not impacting the resource. When someone tells me they caught 85 trout today, I disapprove.”
“Some pieces of tackle have magical properties. I can’t explain it, but it’s true.”
“In fly fishing, the results are purely a product of what you put into it. Life is like that.”
“The best anglers I know all share a steadiness of application. They don’t give in to doubts.”
“There’s an old Irish proverb: “It’s better to be lucky than to rise early.” I told that to one of my fishing partners, and he said, ‘That explains everything.'”
“When fishing with their sons, fathers are often burdened by a kind of subliminal disciplinarian role that does not fit very well with going fishing.”
“The year I was born, the population of the United States was almost exactly half of what it is now. That pretty much explains the ‘good old days.'”
“A real epiphany for me was realizing how many great casters I’ve seen getting out-fished.”
“The ceremony of fishing familiar waters appeals to me tremendously. We have a limited time on earth, and I like the idea of having a deep relationship with some aspect of the natural world.”
“Nowadays, everything compels us to go faster, get more, buy bigger. Cell phones, computers, the proliferation of roads, signals, cues…it’s an avalanche of information, and it’s smothering us. None of that fits with the kind of fishing I like to do.”
“Some rivers are so enchanting they put me into a dreamy state to the point that I don’t really know where I am. I get so lost in the ozone I have to ask, ‘what pool am I in, where am I?’ That’s absorption.”
“The Adams is quite possibly the greatest trout fly ever.”
“I’ve been fishing my home river on a daily basis for 30 years, and even though it’s just a creek, I learn something radically new every year. Just last week, I realized I’ve been fishing one of my favorite runs from the wrong side all this time. It’s amazing.”
“My advice to new fly anglers is to get good instruction and get off on the right foot. But leave plenty of room to make your own mistakes and discoveries.”
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