Quotes by : John Burnside

When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they....

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

If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language....

What the flamingo teaches a child, at that subliminal level where animal encounters work, is that gravity....

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

Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged,....

It's laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision.....

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking,....

The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into....

Poetry stands or falls by its music.