Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The essence of sport is courage.
I may be the wrong person for my life.
I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.
It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.
I'm a neurotic fiction writer who'd like to be a cowboy.
Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.
My life was the best omelette you could make with a chainsaw
My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.
I am not a team player, including my inadequacies as a parent.
I think there's only one interesting story... and that's struggle.
Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.
Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.
I liked Hemingway better before I began to be called 'Hemingwayesque.'
The trouble is, you can't properly present something you don't believe in.
I'm a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.
Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
I think anybody alert to the inspiration to write has to be kind of sensitized to the unexpected.
You can't say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it's just what the deadbeat ordered.
I like to write about the solitary things people do. Humans seem to function best when they're alone.
The mountains paralleled the valley and the snowy peaks were extending with fall to the valley floor.
I had just settled Grandma on her folding chair and popped open our box lunch when the corpse floated by.
I wrote a lot of 'Driving on the Rim' by giving myself the gift of being just as eccentric as I felt like.
I've outlived my parents, and I've had some wonderful second chances in life. I feel remarkably uncheated.
It's funny, but... you're sort of a moving target for fortune, and you never know when it will befall you.
I've spent as much of my life fishing as decency allowed, and sometimes I don't let even that get in my way.
Marriage is anti-romantic - husband and wife are terms like 'turkey' and 'goose.' Worse, they denote ownership.
I strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do, and that is embody the human spirit.
An undisturbed river is as perfect as we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity.
I'm not considered as illegitimate as I once was. Because in a sense, I'm like lip cancer - I'm not going to go away.
By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.
The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.
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.
Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.
I like Halldor Laxness and Machado de Assis - people who try to understand the human condition by looking at intimate pictures of human life.
I'm a really a fanatical reviser, and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text, or I'll keep fooling with it forever.
I had a passionate zest for Key West life in all of its little details. I'm not sure why or where that came from, but I was so excited to be there.
You reach a point at which you have to view your life through the things you've spent so much time doing. The alternative is a perilous feeling of waste.
I never wanted to be a celebrity writer. I wanted to be a good writer. I'm still trying to be a good writer. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.
I'm always surprised to rediscover that there's something kind of scary about life; and that the feeling we have that we're in charge is probably ill founded.
All the ranchers I know have had back surgery, operations on their rotator cuffs. They all have new knees. I'd like to think I belong to that breed, but I don't.
Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don't want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.
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.
I'm certainly afraid of not being able to write for some reason. I guess I've had spells of not necessarily writer's block, but something like that. I find that pretty terrifying.
I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now.
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.
I had a spell no more striking than other people of my job description. I did all the things you weren't supposed to do. I had a motto: When in doubt, try it. I went out and committed experience.
Generally, we are united in the belief that all rod design has been progressive and that the ideas about fly rods in the past were so bad as to make it amazing that people were able to fish at all.
After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.
In the future, I mean to be a fine streamside entomologist. I'm going to start on that when I am much too old to do any of the two thousand things I can think of that are more fun than screening insects in cold running water
There's a view of Montana writing that seems stage-managed by the Chamber of Commerce - it's all about writers like A. B. Guthrie and Ivan Doig. It used to bother me that nobody had a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza.