John Burnside Quotes
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
Quotes to Explore
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
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Once you make it to your point of making it, you'll appreciate the struggle.
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The man for me is the cherry on the pie. But I'm the pie and my pie is good all by itself. Even if I don't have a cherry.
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I love clothes but I have spent so much of my professional life creating an image of one kind or another that it is nice not to care about it in life and let your skin breathe.
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A leader is admired, a boss is feared.
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Social revolutions are never simple.
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I think what television and video games do is reminiscent of drug addiction. There's a measure of reinforcement and a behavioural loop.
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I was the first one in my family to go away to college. I came from a small town where there was no guidance in the high school at all. It was a mill town, and I never knew anyone who made their living from the arts. When you did go away to college, you went away to be something - an engineer, or a teacher, or a chemist.
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My priority is to take care of my daughter and my family.
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Bands develop their own weird ways of doing things.
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When I was younger, I was insecure for about 10 years: I wore glasses, had a cow's lick, buck teeth and braces. I looked ridiculous.
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Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.
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Power says if you are a committee chairman, your idea is good only because you have got power.
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The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work, thus gaining for oneself better terms - or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial - an experience we may call 'prospering.'
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I don't see myself as a diva at all.
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I placed my new novel, 'The Book of Lost Fragrances', in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.
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There's only one way to become a hitter. Go up to the plate and get mad. Get mad at yourself and mad at the pitcher.
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I was embarrassed about modeling. When you're at school and you're modeling, it sounds very glamorous, but I didn't want to do things that no one else was doing. I didn't want to be the odd one out. I wanted to be part of the gang.
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I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.
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Always keep absorbing art and looking at paintings and reading books and watching movies in other languages, just getting to know the world at hand and the world of the past. It's important to keep absorbing the world and keep engaging with it, and often that means not thinking about movies and thinking about other things.
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Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. .... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head...
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I think we could stack up. I don't know how it would be to have the whole world looking over your shoulder.
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As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
