Top 95 Quotes by 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 book about my father.'

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

I don't like the term 'mental illness.' I'd rather just say 'mad.' Just like I always say 'loony bin,' not 'mental hospital.'

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.