John Burnside Quotes
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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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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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My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
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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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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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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 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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It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.
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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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Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
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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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The fabric of a garden is determined as much by its textures as by its tonal range and architectural flair.
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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 human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.