Norman MacCaig Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

If
If your hand came, dead in the dead of night,
And touched my forehead, waking me to see
You standing dead there in the dead of night,
I who fear ghosts would have no fear at all.
I'd greet you with the tenderest hello
And you would smile, though sad. And then you'd go.
There would be nothing deathly in your death
For your love always was the laughing sort
That quickened life and would not die with death.
And when you'd gone, I would not want to weep
That loving gaiety would still be there
Filling with its own peace the quickened air.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

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

I don't think of myself all the time.

The day
Was like the buzzard on the pine.

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

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 will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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