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

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

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

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

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

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
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


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

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 don't think of myself all the time.
Norman MacCaig

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.
Norman MacCaig

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

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

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

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