Quotes from John Burnside

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's the wonderful thing with nerds: they're enthusiasts. Not having a life means you get to love things with a passion and nobody bothers you about it.

I remember when I first encountered anthropocentrism. I was in primary school and, in preparation for our confirmation, the class was learning about the afterlife.

Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation's ledger books through false accounting.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.

We do not need to be heroes to save the world; all we need is humility, a critical view of the commercial and political interests of those who would mislead us into wrongdoing, and a sense of wonder.

As a child, I was always intrigued by the question: what is it that distinguishes a city from a town? Is it size? Population? Location? When I asked grown-ups, the confident answer was that a city has to have a cathedral - which, to a child raised in a devout Catholic setting, made sense.

People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself.

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.

For a bird, especially for the more musically inventive, song is the defining characteristic, the primary way by which it knows itself and is known by others. To lose its species song is to lose not just its identity but some part of its presence in the world.

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

For the Yupik, all life was continuous, animal with human with 'spirit', and recognising that continuum allowed them to undergo transformations that we, locked into our own disappointingly Cartesian skins, find impossible even to imagine.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

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