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.

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.

My life was the best omelette you could make with a chainsaw

Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.

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

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.

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.