John Burnside Quotes
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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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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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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.
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When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.
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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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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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My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
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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 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.
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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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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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Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
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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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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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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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With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
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Poetry stands or falls by its music.
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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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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.