Norman MacCaig Quotes

33 quotes in 432 categories

• I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
• When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.
• 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…
• If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
• I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.
• 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…
• Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
• When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
• 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 think of myself all the time.
• I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
• I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.

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