Norman MacCaig Quotations

I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

Well, I love fishing. I wouldn't kill a fly myself but I've no hesitation in killing a fish. A lot of men are like that. No bother. Out you come. Thump. And that's not the only reason.

I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!

I don't think of myself all the time.

I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely.

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

There are books up there I haven't read for many years but I wouldn't put them out. I never know when I might want to read them again.

The nineteenth century novels came from a time when there was no television and people had time to read novels in three volumes.

I just didn't want to shoot other people.

In some ways I'm a reticent man, and for quite a number of years there wasn't very much of my real true deep feelings in my writing.

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

I learned words, I learned words; but half of them died from lack of exercise. And the ones I use often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.