Quotes from Jonathan Miles

I'm either proud or embarrassed to say that I never took a journalism class in my life.

Young men feel they have much to prove; older men, as a very general rule, tend to feel more comfortable in their skins.

Ask any deer camp old-timer for a foolproof recipe, and you're likely to encounter a lot of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. There is a reason for that: Mushrooms plus cream plus game meat adds up to a perfect trinity of flavors.

If you're trout fishing in the lochs of Scotland, your catch may end up like this: batter-crusted with that ubiquitous Scottish staple, oats; and served beside a generous mound of stovies, Scottish slang for stove-roasted potatoes.

Roasting fish that's encased inside a salt crust is a centuries-old method of ensuring moist, ultra-flavorful flesh.

Aside from the martini, the mint julep may be the most iconic cocktail in America.

The mint julep may be sacred in the South, but so is college football, and that doesn't stop us from enjoying it.

In the South, dove hunts do not draw quietly to a close. Sometimes, at the simplest end, a grill and cooler are hauled to the edge of the field, and the doves' breasts are grilled - usually swaddled in bacon, maybe with a jalapeno tucked inside - as the hunters tell and retell tales of the day's shooting.

Vitello tonnato is a classic dish from Italy's Piedmont region that, frankly, sounds patently insane: veal slices dressed in a creamy sauce made from canned tuna and capers. The brain may say no, but the mouth disagrees.

The angle we give the bathroom mirror is always meant to flatter.

The spectacle of a good bar fight, properly executed and healthily ended, is not merely annoying boorishness. The best of them - an admittedly minor slice - are shaded with the elements of high art.

I find airports to be purgatorial in many ways. I mean, even from the basics of the design: you know, this sort of - this muted gray and the fluorescent lights.

David Benioff can hardly be classified as an underdog. The 2002 film adaptation of his first novel, 'The 25th Hour,' was directed by Spike Lee and starred Edward Norton.

Most of the time, comparing printed song lyrics with poems is like comparing recipes with food: that's to say, patently unfair.

Bullies are bullies, and they're always uninteresting.

A combination of stir-fry and salad, Lok Lak is a popular staple in Cambodia. It's usually made with beef, but in olden times, in the country's mountainous areas, venison would've gone sizzling into the wok.

Novelists lie for a living - what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? - but generally see a distinction between lying on the page and lying off it.

There is a mammalian side to all of us; on occasion, it rears its head, snarls, makes a mess, acts the fool, howls at the moon, gives or gets a black eye.

Poems, unlike songs, are written to be read and, thus, come equipped with their own rhythms and melodies; they're self-contained entities, the whole shebang.

A Negroni demands your full, upright attention. It will not tolerate mindless swigging the way all those sweet summertime drinks do, which is just one reason no one has ever ordered one at a swim-up bar at a resort pool.

So much magazine writing is playing to an empty room. You work like a plow horse, your words get printed on a half-million or more copies, and then it often just disappears into this national vacuum.

The best largemouth bass fishing I've ever encountered was at Lake Huites, a vast impoundment on the outskirts of the Sierra Madre Occidentals in Sinaloa, Mexico.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with deer burgers and venison chili, but with a little gusto, those stalwarts can go from satisfying to sublime.

For me, alcohol has this endless fascination that there's this substance that can enhance life so beautifully and destroy it so completely.