Scottish - Poet | November 14, 1910 - January 23, 1996
I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
Norman MacCaig
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If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
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Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.
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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.
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When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.
FishingMeNobodyGoKnowWithin
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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Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
MisunderstoodWhoLikeAnybody
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!
LoveThinkBetterNiceTrueRoom
But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.
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I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
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I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
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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.
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