QUOTES by John Burnside
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People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself.
Quote by -John Burnside
I moved south when I was 11 years old, moved to England. I've lived in all kinds of places, all parts of England.
Quote by -John Burnside
I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.
Quote by -John Burnside
'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.
Quote by -John Burnside
I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.
Quote by -John Burnside
The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.
Quote by -John Burnside
It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.
Quote by -John Burnside
If I tell you a story, you can choose to believe me, or you can question it.
Quote by -John Burnside
The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.
Quote by -John Burnside
'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.
Quote by -John Burnside
Thatcherite economic policy was most acutely felt in the coal industry, where tens of thousands of jobs were lost as pits were shut down.
Quote by -John Burnside
As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
Usually, I would mistrust a book if it took that long to write. Usually, if it isn't done in two years, I suspect there's something wrong and throw it away.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor.
Quote by -John Burnside
One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'
Quote by -John Burnside
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.
Quote by -John Burnside
I remember a nightfall from childhood, far from home and off the known track: I'd been walking with some older boys, but they ran off and left me, and as darkness hurried in, I suddenly realised how far from home I was.
Quote by -John Burnside
I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.
Quote by -John Burnside
For 10 years, I gave away my possessions every year and moved on to a new place.
Quote by -John Burnside
One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.
Quote by -John Burnside
In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.
Quote by -John Burnside
What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth.
Quote by -John Burnside
With all the goodwill and local initiative in the world, we are not about to rewild anything until we change our way of thinking about our place in the creaturely world.
Quote by -John Burnside
My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.
Quote by -John Burnside
Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
Quote by -John Burnside
With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
Quote by -John Burnside
I remember playing the Mad Hatter in a school play and feeling very comfortable in the character.
Quote by -John Burnside