Quotes by : 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....

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

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....

This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we....

If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big....

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

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

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