Norman MacCaig Quotes

If
If your hand came, dead in the dead of night,
And touched my forehead, waking me to see
You standing dead there in the dead of night,
I who fear ghosts would have no fear at all.
I'd greet you with the tenderest hello
And you would smile, though sad. And then you'd go.
There would be nothing deathly in your death
For your love always was the laughing sort
That quickened life and would not die with death.
And when you'd gone, I would not want to weep
That loving gaiety would still be there
Filling with its own peace the quickened air.

— Norman MacCaig

“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

“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

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

— Norman MacCaig

“I think these movements and become them, here,
In this room's stillness, none of them about,
And relish them all-until I think of where
Thrashed by a crook, the cursive adder writes
Quick V's and Q's in the dust and rubs them out.
from Movements”

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

“And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.”

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

“Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.”

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

“I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.”

— Norman MacCaig

“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

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

“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

“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!”

— Norman MacCaig

I don't think of myself all the time.

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

“I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.”

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

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

— Norman MacCaig

“And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.”

— Norman MacCaig

“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

“I just didn't want to shoot other people.”

— Norman MacCaig

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