Something to think about: If you fish the wrong fly long and hard enough, it will sooner or later become the right fly.

Trout aren't naturally as selective as they've become in crowded tailwaters - they've been trained to be like that by too much fishing pressure. I've seen tailwater fish that are so hysterical they'll refuse naturals. You wonder how they get enough to eat.

Fly-fishing is solitary, contemplative, misanthropic, scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with conflicting aesthetic considerations. It's not even clear if catching fish is actually the point.

I used to like fishing because I thought it had some larger significance. Now I like fishing because it's the one thing I can think of that probably doesn't.

It's an odd fact of life that whichever side of the stream you're on, two-thirds of the best water is out of reach on the other side.

Maybe your stature as a fly fisherman isn't determined by how big a trout you can catch, but by how small a trout you can catch without being disappointed.

Fish sense, applied in the field, is what the old Zen masters would call enlightenment: simply the ability to see what's right there in front of you without having to sift through a lot of thoughts and theories and, yes, expensive fishing tackle.