About Norman MacCaig: Norman Alexander MacCaig is known for its humour, simplicity of language and great popularity.
If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
I will not feel, I will not feel, until I have to
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
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.
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.
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.
And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.
I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.
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 said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.
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.
People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.
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.
Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.
When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.
When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.
