Norman MacCaig Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I don't think of myself all the time.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”