Norman MacCaig Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Fishing, Miles, Five

  44 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Offering, Bird, Literature

  56 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Thinking, Literature, Taught

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Book, Years, Twenties

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Liars, Exercise, Looks

  Norman MacCaig (2013). “The Many Days: Selected Poems of Norman MacCaig”, p.13, Birlinn

  6 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Nature, Love Is, Hills

  88 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Long, People, Literature

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Breathing, Literature, Conversation

  7 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Sex, Character, Play

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Water, Skins, Caves

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Writing, People, Literature

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Teacher, Book, Paper

  6 Copy quote

• Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

  Norman MacCaig

  Writing, Misunderstood, Literature

  3 Copy quote

• In some ways I'm a reticent man, and for quite a number of years there wasn't very much of my real true deep feelings in my writing.

  Norman MacCaig

  Real, Writing, Men

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think of myself all the time.

  Norman MacCaig

  Thinking

  4 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Book, Literature

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Passion, Years, Literature

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Eight, Years, Dying

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Men, Fishing, Literature

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Book, Fishing, Sides

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Norman MacCaig

  Thinking, People, Literature

  3 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Men, Thinking, Voice

  6 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Years, Literature, American Poetry

  3 Copy quote

• I just didn't want to shoot other people.

  Norman MacCaig

  People, Literature, Want

  3 Copy quote

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

  Norman MacCaig

  Boys, Great Love, Literature

  3 Copy quote

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