Quotes from Thomas McGuane

I wrote a lot of 'Driving on the Rim' by giving myself the gift of being just as eccentric as I felt like.

I am not a team player, including my inadequacies as a parent.

I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life, and they don't live long, and the more you're around them, you kind of accept that.

People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'

All the ranchers I know have had back surgery, operations on their rotator cuffs. They all have new knees. I'd like to think I belong to that breed, but I don't.

I'm always surprised to rediscover that there's something kind of scary about life; and that the feeling we have that we're in charge is probably ill founded.

You reach a point at which you have to view your life through the things you've spent so much time doing. The alternative is a perilous feeling of waste.

Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don't want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

Anglers who see fish exceptionally well can fish successfully in less productive water than anglers who don't. Fishermen love equipment and are always looking for mechanical advantages, but there is nothing to compare with learning to see well; if you see well enough, you can walk out in the mud with no boat and catch fish.

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

I may be the wrong person for my life.

I had a spell no more striking than other people of my job description. I did all the things you weren't supposed to do. I had a motto: When in doubt, try it. I went out and committed experience.

You can't say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it's just what the deadbeat ordered.

I've spent as much of my life fishing as decency allowed, and sometimes I don't let even that get in my way.

I'm certainly afraid of not being able to write for some reason. I guess I've had spells of not necessarily writer's block, but something like that. I find that pretty terrifying.

Maybe I haven't been tested, but I have no fear of death at all. I was with Allen Ginsberg during the last year of his life, and he called all his friends and said, 'I'm on my way out, and it's kind of exciting.' I see it as kind of exciting, too.

The essence of sport is courage.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

I never wanted to be a celebrity writer. I wanted to be a good writer. I'm still trying to be a good writer. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

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

A lot of the writers I've known for 20 years, who used to say, 'Maybe they're right - the novel is dead!' - well, now they don't feel that it's necessarily the biggest job or most sacred calling on the planet. But it's definitely a real thing - it's always been here, always will be here, and one might just as well buckle down and get to work.

I'm a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.

I liked Hemingway better before I began to be called 'Hemingwayesque.'