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 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 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 Quote

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.
- Norman MacCaig Quote

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 Quote

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

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
- Norman MacCaig Quote

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 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 Quote

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 Quote

I just didn't want to shoot other people.
- Norman MacCaig Quote

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
- Norman MacCaig Quote

I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.
- Norman MacCaig Quote

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
- Norman MacCaig Quote

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

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
- Norman MacCaig 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 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 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 Quote

People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.
- Norman MacCaig 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 Quote

Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.
- Norman MacCaig 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 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 Quote