Thomas McGuane Quotes

We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.

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.

America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that's 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We're in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.

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

I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either ethical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.

The trouble is, you can't properly present something you don't believe in.

To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it.

Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time does not seem to be of the essence and somewhere in the system is what they are looking for.