John Burnside Quotes
-
'The Asylum Dance' was written after I'd moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area of Fife.
-
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.
-
Sadly, bird illustration has always been an under-appreciated art.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A forest - the word dates back to the Norman occupancy, when it meant an area set aside for England's violent new masters to hunt boar and deer - is necessarily larger than a wood. It belonged to the king and was a fit place for his recreation.
-
Given the right information to help them decide, people will opt for conditions that benefit our creaturely neighbours, even where they have no particular interest in larks or cuckoo wasps - because those conditions benefit us.
-
Every time I write a book, I think how I could be doing it better to please people - a nicer book with nicer characters - but I just can't.
-
I don't like the term 'mental illness.' I'd rather just say 'mad.' Just like I always say 'loony bin,' not 'mental hospital.'
-
Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery.
-
High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, to open our eyes and take account of what we have missed, reminding us that, in spite of our emphasis on the visual in everyday speech, we see so very little of the world.
-
If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how.
-
It may be a cliche, but cliche or not, I fear the day when the only marsh harriers or peregrines I can look at are in paintings by Joseph Wolf or Bruno Liljefors - and no matter how beautiful those works may be, life is the great thing: life, life, life.
-
My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.
-
I moved south when I was 11 years old, moved to England. I've lived in all kinds of places, all parts of England.
-
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
-
I remember when I first encountered anthropocentrism. I was in primary school and, in preparation for our confirmation, the class was learning about the afterlife.
-
I really like to try my hand at everything, and I think it's probably dangerous to let oneself be pigeon-holed, not necessarily by other people, but in one's own mind.
-
Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most elegant phenomena.
-
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.
-
The woods were a boon; all too often, the forest offered danger and mystery. Yet it could be liberating. If you entered that wild place on its own terms, you might be accorded wisdom.
-
A mad person isn't someone who sees what isn't there; he's someone who sees what is there but that others can't see. I really believe that.
-
Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.
-
I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.