Animal Quote by 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 the Lakota…

— John Burnside

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

— 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…

— John Burnside

This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not…

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

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

— 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 they ran…

— 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…

— 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.

— John Burnside