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Norman MacCaig

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

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

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Asa Don Brown

"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

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Asa Don Brown

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

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Asa Don Brown

"Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."

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Asa Don Brown

"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"

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Asa Don Brown

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

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Asa Don Brown

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."

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Asa Don Brown

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

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Asa Don Brown

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

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Asa Don Brown

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."

Explore more quotes by Norman MacCaig

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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!"
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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."
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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."
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Norman MacCaig
"People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share."
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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."
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Norman MacCaig
"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."
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Norman MacCaig
"I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now."
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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."
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Norman MacCaig
"I find it's impossible for me to read Proust."
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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."
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