It is easy to tell tourists from tarpon. Tarpon have a narrow, bony plate inside the mouth of their lower jaw. Tourists have both upper and lower plates.

The chief difference between big-game fishing and weightlifting is that weightlifters never clutter up their library walls with stuffed barbells

The truth is, fish have very little sex life. If you have ever tried to make love under water, you will know why.

Contrary to common belief, it is not true that if you cut a worm-fisherman in half, each half will grow into a complete fisherman. For which we should all be eternally grateful.

I get all the truth I need in the newspaper every morning, and every chance I get I go fishing, or swap stories with fishermen to get the taste of it out of my mouth.

...there are few things deader than a dead brown trout stream.

I make it a rule never to weigh or measure a fish I've caught, but simply to estimate its dimensions as accurately as possible, and then, when telling about it, to improve these figures by roughly a fifth, or twenty percent. I do this mainly because most people believe all fishermen exaggerate by at least twenty percent, and so I allow for the discounting my audience is almost certain to apply.