Words matter. These are the best Donald McCaig Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you get a dog that goes out there and bumps the sheep, comes on too hard, the sheep don’t trust him.
I’m a workaday writer.
Border collies predate the British Kennel Club. They’ve been bred consistently for 100 years. They’re the last working dogs in the world, with some minor exceptions. Bench shows, dog shows have ruined the other breeds, like the hunting dogs. Border collies are peasant dogs, and that’s protected them.
Research is the historical novelist’s map, constraint, and purest energy.
Rhett Butler is very mysterious. He disappears, he reappears, God knows where he goes. We know nothing about his family to speak of.
What we didn’t realize then – and one of the many things Timothy Leary was wrong about – is that when you drop out, you inevitably also drop in.
I don’t care to read about Garrison Keillor. We cover the same sort of territory, and I don’t need to know anything more about him.
Driving alone, you can make 800 miles a day.
A sheepdog trial is the most difficult test of a man and dog ever devised.
You have to train a dog to think.
I do not believe you can work with animals – certainly you cannot train them – without deciding that if humans have souls, dogs do, too.
Sheep may not be brilliant, but they know that sheep in pen is stage number one of lamb chops.
If you don’t have work for a border collie or time to train it properly, your bright young border collie will invent his own work, and chances are you won’t like it.
In life, sometimes it pays off when you really don’t give a damn.
The majority of border collie owners and breeders don’t want to have anything to do with the show ring.
I am built funny. Picture Mark Twain’s head on Ichabod Crane’s body. Now hold your mental picture to the light and crumple it.
A young dog’s faith is absolute… Dogs are notorious for hope. Dogs believe that this morning, this very morning, may begin a day of fascination, easily grander than any day in the past.
Had we settled in Pennsylvania, there’s no way I would have written a Confederate novel.
I had been saying to myself for a good many years that I was really a writer and that I was in advertising temporarily.
Border collies were trained in Scotland. They have the Scots’ commands in their genes. At the dog trials, the owners wear those three-piece western suits, cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats, but they carry Scots shepherd’s crooks over their arms and talk to their dogs in Scots accents.
