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What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor.
John Burnside -
Sometimes, when the wind hits hard and icicles form on the sea cliffs, we can all come together - and at those times, we are at our best.
John Burnside
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I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.
John Burnside -
I'm an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac.
John Burnside -
'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.
John Burnside -
One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'
John Burnside -
I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.
John Burnside -
Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
John Burnside
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I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if somewhat routine; nevertheless, in the workaday world, it is wedlock that is most likely to offer the occasion for life-threatening disappointment.
John Burnside -
I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.
John Burnside -
I think humans have to learn a new way of dwelling on this earth. A way of living with their companions: animals, plants and fish.
John Burnside -
A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance of natural form and a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of the world we inhabit.
John Burnside -
I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.
John Burnside -
I have never understood why so many gardeners favour straight lines and narrow, regulated borders; perhaps they think wildness could work only in a larger space.
John Burnside
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The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.
John Burnside -
You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.
John Burnside -
When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative, and I realised I knew nothing about my father's circumstances other than what he'd told me.
John Burnside -
I don't like the term 'mental illness.' I'd rather just say 'mad.' Just like I always say 'loony bin,' not 'mental hospital.'
John Burnside -
The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.
John Burnside -
All my life, I have been a celebrant of Halloween. For me, it is the most important day of the year, the turning point in the old pagan calendar.
John Burnside
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What the flamingo teaches a child, at that subliminal level where animal encounters work, is that gravity is not just a limitation, but also a possible partner in an intriguing, potentially joyful game.
John Burnside -
Sadly, bird illustration has always been an under-appreciated art.
John Burnside -
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
John Burnside -
For a bird, especially for the more musically inventive, song is the defining characteristic, the primary way by which it knows itself and is known by others. To lose its species song is to lose not just its identity but some part of its presence in the world.
John Burnside