Norman MacCaig

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

“Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.”

“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.”

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

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

“I will not feel, I will notfeel, untilI have to”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't think of myself all the time.”

“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.”

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

“Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.”

“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.”