Art & Creativity Quote by Norman MacCaig

MacCaig turns nostalgia into a test of authenticity: time either corrodes a bond or reveals it was never that deep. The line about friends isn’t just cozy sentiment; it’s a quiet standard for what counts as real connection. Most relationships, like most cultural enthusiasms, don’t survive long absences without needing explanation, apology, or reinvention. The rare exception - “you’re lucky when that happens” - carries an almost Calvinist austerity. Luck, not effort, not performance, governs the best returns.

Then he pulls the rug: “I feel the same about books.” The swerve is the point. By equating books with friends, he refuses the usual hierarchy where reading is improvement and friendship is life. For a poet, that’s a sly piece of self-defense. It argues that literature isn’t an accessory to experience; it’s a relationship with memory, voice, and temperament. A good book, revisited after decades, meets you with the same essential presence, while you arrive altered. The encounter becomes a measure of your own change: what you now notice, what now stings, what now comforts.

MacCaig’s context matters: a Scottish poet associated with clarity, restraint, and an unsentimental lyricism. His style here is conversational but engineered. The long, plain sentence mimics the breathy rush of reunion, then the last clause lands like a wink - not jokey, but lightly defiant. In an age that treats culture as a feed, he’s staking a claim for the durable: art that doesn’t expire, and companionship you can reopen like a well-thumbed spine.