I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.

All my life, I have been a celebrant of Halloween. For me, it is the most important day of the year, the turning point in the old pagan calendar.

Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.

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.

For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.

A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself.

Andoya is in a different world, set at the northern edge of Europe in what seems to be a time and weather of its own.

A forest - the word dates back to the Norman occupancy, when it meant an area set aside for England's violent new masters to hunt boar and deer - is necessarily larger than a wood. It belonged to the king and was a fit place for his recreation.

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.

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.

I really like to try my hand at everything, and I think it's probably dangerous to let oneself be pigeon-holed, not necessarily by other people, but in one's own mind.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

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.

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.

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.

Clearly, any well-kept garden will be a source of pleasure in the summer months; in the bleak urban midwinter, however, there are few activities more likely to energise the spirit than a botanical walk.

Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she was tall, slender, very dark: an intelligent, sly girl possessed of what I think of now, though I didn't think of then, as a kind of debatable beauty.

I remember how, back in the 1980s, the Scottish Flow Country became an object of bemused controversy as rich celebrities and businessmen from south of the border acquired great tracts of this vast wetland in the far north in order to plant non-native conifer plantations that attract hefty tax breaks.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

I have never understood why so many gardeners favour straight lines and narrow, regulated borders; perhaps they think wildness could work only in a larger space.

I think humans have to learn a new way of dwelling on this earth. A way of living with their companions: animals, plants and fish.

I remember playing the Mad Hatter in a school play and feeling very comfortable in the character.

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.