Quotes from Norman MacCaig

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

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

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

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.

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.

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 don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

I will not feel, I will not feel, until I have to

I learned words, I learned words; but half of them died from lack of exercise. And the ones I use often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

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

There are bad journeys, to a bitter place I can't go to – yet, I lean towards it, tugging to get there, and thank God I'm clogged with the world. It grips me, I hold it.