Top 42 Norman MacCaig Quotes

#1. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #61400
#2. People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #75280
#3. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #87609
#4. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #90807
#5. When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #129853
#6. Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #158557
#7. I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #173370
#8. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #211759
#9. When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #284533
#10. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #314302
#11. I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #410152
#12. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #422264
#13. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #436801
#14. I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #511380
#15. But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #543165
#16. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #572864
#17. I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #701466
#18. 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!

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #728862
#19. I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #729729
#20. And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #737027
#21. If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #758250
#22. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #846577
#23. And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #921868
#24. When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #939756
#25. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #947221
#26. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #953094
#27. I don't think of myself all the time.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #994448
#28. Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1039788
#29. And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1052138
#30. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1193954
#31. I just didn't want to shoot other people.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1246798
#32. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1379413
#33. I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1391214
#34. 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.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1402544
#35. I will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1491694
#36. Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1519816
#37. Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1623320
#38. I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1663524
#39. The day
Was like the buzzard on the pine.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1669666
#40. I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1719328
#41. I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1729428
#42. I think these movements and become them, here,
In this room's stillness, none of them about,
And relish them all-until I think of where
Thrashed by a crook, the cursive adder writes
Quick V's and Q's in the dust and rubs them out.
from Movements

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig Quotes #1764714

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