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.

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

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

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!

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't think of myself all the time.

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.

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.

When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

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.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

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.

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.

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

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.

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