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.
Category Archive: Norman MacCaig
I’m very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Well, I’m a light traveller. I chuck things away.
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.
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.