John Burnside Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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 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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My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
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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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With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
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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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Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Poetry stands or falls by its music.
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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.