Newartists must break a hole in the subconscious and go fishing there.

-Hale, Robert Beverly
  In Time,11  Apr.

Fishing is undoubtedly a form of madness but, happily for the once-bitten, there is no cure.

-Douglas-Home, Baron
  Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I canonlycomparetoa stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
Quoted in Hawker Instructions toYoung Sportsmen (1859). The attribution is doubtful, and Swift has also been credited with the remark.

Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.

-Marquis, Don(ald Robert Perry)
Attributed.

All Americans believethat theyare bornfishermen.Fora man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.

-Steinbeck,John Ernest
  Quoted in ColinJarmanThe Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

I shall stay [the reader] no longer than to wish him a rainy day to read this†discourse; and that if he be an honest angler, the east wind may never blow when he goes a- fishing.

-Walton, Izaak
  The Compleat Angler,'Epistle to the Reader'.