John Burnside Quotes
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The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.
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I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.
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Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.
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With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.
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For 10 years, I gave away my possessions every year and moved on to a new place.
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The fabric of a garden is determined as much by its textures as by its tonal range and architectural flair.
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My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.
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There is a red sandy beach in the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia that is unlike any other shore landscape I have ever seen. The world's highest tides wash its shores, and the soft cliffs of Blomidon Provincial Park are constantly crumbling away; whole trees will occasionally slide down to the sea to decay slowly in the wind and brine.
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Growing up, I learnt to think, 'Let's make it a big night tonight, as you never know what's going to happen next.' So now I have enough, I take too much; when I get the chance to have a fine dinner, I will. And it's had an effect on my health.
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My father was this big, tough guy, almost heroic in proportion to me as a child. It was only later that I saw how fearful he was.
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As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.
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It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.
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For the Yupik, all life was continuous, animal with human with 'spirit', and recognising that continuum allowed them to undergo transformations that we, locked into our own disappointingly Cartesian skins, find impossible even to imagine.
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Once upon a time, forests were repositories of magic for the human race.
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I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.
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It is common knowledge now that we depend on insects for our continued existence; that, without key pollinators, the human population would collapse in less than a decade.
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As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.
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One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.
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Thatcherite economic policy was most acutely felt in the coal industry, where tens of thousands of jobs were lost as pits were shut down.
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Poetry stands or falls by its music.
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With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
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The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.
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With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.