When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.
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.
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
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.
I learned words, I learned words; but half of them died from lack of exercise. And the ones I use often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.
I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely.
People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.
If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
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.
Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
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.
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.
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
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.
I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.
I don't think of myself all the time.
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
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.
I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.
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.
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.
And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.
