John Burnside

In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo's messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of…

— John Burnside

The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a…

— 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…

— John Burnside

This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we…

— John Burnside

My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of…

— John Burnside

“There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries…

— John Burnside

I remember how, back in the 1980s, the Scottish Flow Country became an object of bemused controversy as rich celebrities and businessmen…

— John Burnside

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues…

— John Burnside

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

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about…

— John Burnside

“Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish…

— John Burnside

What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a…

— John Burnside

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative…

— John Burnside

We do not need to be heroes to save the world; all we need is humility, a critical view of the commercial…

— John Burnside

Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our…

— John Burnside

If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how.

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.

— John Burnside

For the Yupik, all life was continuous, animal with human with 'spirit', and recognising that continuum allowed them to undergo transformations that…

— John Burnside

The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer…

— John Burnside

“He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [...] He needed a _history_, a sense of self.…

— John Burnside