Words matter. These are the best Norman MacCaig Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
And if they haven’t got poetry in them, there’s nothing you can do that will produce it.
I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I’d throw them out.
I find it’s impossible for me to read Proust.
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.
Anybody who writes doesn’t like to be misunderstood.
I don’t care whether a book is a first edition or not. I’m not a bibliophile in that word’s natural sense.
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.
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.
I never think about poetry except when I’m writing it. I mean my poetry.
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!
If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
People haven’t got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.
When I go fishing I like to know that there’s nobody within five miles of me.
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.
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
And it’s impossible for me to read Henry James.
I’m very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
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.
