When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous. – 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
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century. – 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
And if they haven’t got poetry in them, there’s nothing you can do that will produce it. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
