A Quote by Norman MacCaig
In some ways I'm a reticent man, and for quite a number of years there wasn't very much of my real true deep feelings in my writing.
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People pay far too much attention to the television and they're quite literal in some ways. At the beginning, when I was playing very stupid characters, I think people genuinely thought I was possibly quite dim-witted myself, which is a compliment in some ways, as I must have been doing my job very well.
My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.
I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.
I try to make the writing as regular and regimented as possible. I usually get up at around 5 a.m. and read what I wrote the day before. Some of the time, after I read, I think the writing's very good and some of the time I feel embarrassed by what I've written. You have to learn not to pay too much attention to these feelings.
I found it quite easy to carry on a casual conversation it was as if my real feelings were down fathoms deep in my mind and what we said was just a feathery surface spray.
It was a strange man, a kind of black humorist, a true philosopher. One day he said: "If my books could ensure an increase in the number of murders, well, it will mean that they have been quite useful in some way or another."
True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious.
But there is no doubt that my own views on this are, in quite a number of ways, very different from those of Quine.
I always have strong feelings when I'm writing a book. Sometimes when I'm writing a book, I even cry when I'm writing. Once I read a quotation that I thought was very true for me, which is: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
Violence is very much with us, and we like to see it. I doubt if you can change that, and I'm not sure you should want to. I have occasionally been very upset by something I was writing, but it's quite rare: I keep my writing very separate from my life.
I've always thought of my writing as a spiritual practice. But I think that fiction is the most supernatural kind of writing that you can do - because of the ways that the real and the unreal weave together to create something that feels more true than anything.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Using the device of an imaginary world allows me in some strange way to go to the central issues - it's one of many ways to express feelings about real people, about real human relationships.
I think it's easier to be cynical. I think the temptation, often, among writers is to write about anything other than real, true, deep feelings.
I think it shapes it in very deep ways that you don't entirely understand. Rainer Maria Rilke said there are two inexhaustible sources for poetry. One is dreams, and the other is childhood. I think childhood is an inexhaustible source of your becoming who you will be and certain deep feelings are set inside of you.
I've worked in male romance movies quite a bit. In fact, I think many years ago, I did a movie called 'Men With Guns,' which was very much in this bromance space. I've done a number of them.
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