Norman MacCaig

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

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

“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!”

“And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.”

“I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.”

“Self under self, a pile of selves I standThreaded on time, and with metaphysic handLift the farm like a lid and seeFarm within farm, and in the centre, me.”