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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
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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
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
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
I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
Norman MacCaig
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
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 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
People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.
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 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 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
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
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
Norman MacCaig
I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.
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
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
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
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
Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.
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 if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
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
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 don't think of myself all the time.
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
I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
Norman MacCaig
And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.
Norman MacCaig
When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.
Norman MacCaig
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
Norman MacCaig
When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.
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
At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.
Charlize Theron
President Johnson and I have a lot in common. We were both born in small towns and we're both fortunate in the fact that we think we married above ourselves.
Richard M. Nixon
The fact is I've been in Massachusetts for the last two weeks, and it seems over the last few days that the price is increasing by the hour at the pump, so there needs to be an aggressive investigation.
Marty Meehan
In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.
Bill Pascrell
The fact is, Latinos now own their own lives and I believe they can afford to look back without judgment.
Ednita Nazario
The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
Lindsay Wagner
It has to do with the fact that Ford, for all his greatness, is an Irish egomaniac, as anyone who knows him will say.
Henry Fonda
I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.
Stephen Fry
People expect us to be different, but we're not. We're very similar people, and it's because we're so similar and close to each other that we make each other laugh - in fact we make each other laugh more than we make anyone else laugh.
Adrian Edmondson
I can't tell you how hard I worked the last year. In fact, I worked so hard that I know I can't maintain that same work level in 2001, so I've got to quit something.
Christopher Darden
The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.
Neal Boortz
In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.
Sharon Gless