Norman MacCaig Quotes

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

I think that my script, if it gets used, would be great. But if it doesn't, I think it inspired them.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

My actual writing process? I have to just love the beat before I even write on it. I can't force myself to write to a beat that I'm not immediately loving.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

I don't have anything to prove as a writer anymore. I write about Panera Bread or Red Lobster or Satan or Richard Ramirez or whatever comes to mind. I just write.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.

The words, "I have a dog named Winn-Dixie," popped into my head in the voice of a small girl with a southern accent. I'd been writing long enough at that point to know not to ignore that kind of red flag. The next day, I put aside what I'd been working on, started with that one sentence, and followed it all the way to the end.

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing.

Just now I've taen the fit o' rhyme / My barmie noddle's working prime.

To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.