With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.

Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.

For 10 years, I gave away my possessions every year and moved on to a new place.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.

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.

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.

My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.

As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.

Thatcherite economic policy was most acutely felt in the coal industry, where tens of thousands of jobs were lost as pits were shut down.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.

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.

Once upon a time, forests were repositories of magic for the human race.

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.

As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.

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.

'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.

I'm an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac.

The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.

If I tell you a story, you can choose to believe me, or you can question it.

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.

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.

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

'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.

The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.

I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.

I moved south when I was 11 years old, moved to England. I've lived in all kinds of places, all parts of England.

Sadly, bird illustration has always been an under-appreciated art.

You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.

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.