"I also like flyfishing - maybe I would have figured a way to make a living out of that?"
About this Quote
A shrug masquerading as a life plan, this line turns leisure into a sly critique of the whole idea of “making a living.” Nigel Dennis isn’t praising flyfishing so much as using it to expose how precarious, performative, and faintly ridiculous career narratives can be. The dash and the “maybe” do most of the work: the speaker toys with an alternate self, but refuses the earnestness of regret. It’s counterfactual as a kind of defensive wit.
Dennis came up in a Britain where class-coded notions of work and taste still carried real force. Flyfishing isn’t a neutral hobby; it signals a certain pastoral, gentlemanly calm, an escape with rules and rituals. Set against the messier, less dependable vocation of writing, it reads like a fantasy of control: a craft you can master, a day you can measure, a “catch” you can point to. Writing, by contrast, offers no such proof of effort besides the awkward question of how you pay rent.
The subtext is that every career is partly a story we tell to make our choices look inevitable. “Figured a way” hints at the improvisation behind supposedly stable livelihoods: you hustle, you rationalize, you convert taste into income and call it destiny. The charm is in the self-deprecation. Dennis lets the romantic daydream in, then punctures it with the economic reality that haunts every artistic life: wanting your pleasures to count as work, and knowing that the world rarely agrees.
Dennis came up in a Britain where class-coded notions of work and taste still carried real force. Flyfishing isn’t a neutral hobby; it signals a certain pastoral, gentlemanly calm, an escape with rules and rituals. Set against the messier, less dependable vocation of writing, it reads like a fantasy of control: a craft you can master, a day you can measure, a “catch” you can point to. Writing, by contrast, offers no such proof of effort besides the awkward question of how you pay rent.
The subtext is that every career is partly a story we tell to make our choices look inevitable. “Figured a way” hints at the improvisation behind supposedly stable livelihoods: you hustle, you rationalize, you convert taste into income and call it destiny. The charm is in the self-deprecation. Dennis lets the romantic daydream in, then punctures it with the economic reality that haunts every artistic life: wanting your pleasures to count as work, and knowing that the world rarely agrees.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
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