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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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Exlpore more Poetry quotes
"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."
"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."
"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"
"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."
"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."
"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."
"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that."
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