John Burnside

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

It's important to have quiet time and isolation.

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

“And I wake, in the cage of my bones, on the same cold ground.”

— John Burnside

The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.

— 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…

— John Burnside

Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most…

— John Burnside

The fabric of a garden is determined as much by its textures as by its tonal range and architectural flair.

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— 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 Asylum Dance' was written after I'd moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area…

— John Burnside

For a bird, especially for the more musically inventive, song is the defining characteristic, the primary way by which it knows itself…

— 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 poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to…

— John Burnside

A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance…

— John Burnside

Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates…

— John Burnside

Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife…

— John Burnside

Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she…

— John Burnside

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my…

— John Burnside

and because what we learn in the dark remains all our lives, a noise like the sea, displacing the day's pale knowledge,…

— John Burnside

As a child, I was always intrigued by the question: what is it that distinguishes a city from a town? Is it…

— John Burnside

“More often than not, the demons of our nature love a recluse; nobody is more vulnerable to himself than the solitary. To…

— 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

There is a red sandy beach in the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia that is unlike any other shore landscape I have…

— 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

High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a…

— John Burnside

“..and she had started to relax - but she was relaxing into something terrible, and she was going about the world in…

— John Burnside

“He was someone who had to live alone, someone who found it difficult to be with others for any length of time,…

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

“If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language were words and…

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— 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

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

— John Burnside