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

quote by Norman MacCaig
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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

quote by Norman MacCaig
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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.

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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.

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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.

quote by Norman MacCaig
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