11 Quotes by Patrick F. McManus

There is no greater fan of fly fishing than the worm.

The two best times to fish is when it’s raining and when it ain’t.

Scholars have long known that fishing eventually turns men into philosophers. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to buy decent tackle on a philosopher’s salary.

What a tourist terms a plague of insects, the fly fisher calls a great hatch.

Rancid was poor. He didn’t seem to know that he was poor, however, and I never had the heart to tell him, because he was the happiest person I’d ever met. If he had known he was poor, of course, then he would have been sad and miserable all the time. As it was, Rancid was able to live out his whole life in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was poor.

Show me a man who fishes in winter, and I’ll show you a fanatic. Actually, I’ll get the better of the deal, because for sheer spectacle a fanatic doesn’t hold a candle to a man who fishes in winter.

Smoked carp tastes just as good as smoked salmon when you ain’t got no smoked salmon.

One word of caution, though, should you ever buy commercial worms. If you go into a backwoods gas station and find a large, rough-looking woman behind the cash register, don’t ask, “Do you have worms?” My friend Retch Sweeney did that a while back. He should get out of his full-body cast any day now.

I believe it is the inability of beginning writers to achieve at least a certain degree of detachment from their writing that defeats so many of them before they even get started. Without this distancing, any criticism of your writing will seem devastating, even incapacitating, whereas with the proper amount of detachment it will seem merely cruel and unusual punishment.