Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

“I think these movements and become them, here, In this room's stillness, none of them about, And relish them all-until I think…

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

“There are bad journeys, to a bitter place I can’t go to – yet, I lean towards it, tugging to get there,…

— Norman MacCaig

“If If your hand came, dead in the dead of night, And touched my forehead, waking me to see You standing dead…

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom…

— Norman MacCaig

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them…

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more…

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

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

— Norman MacCaig