John Burnside

“'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.”

“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.”

“It is common knowledge now that we depend on insects for our continued existence; that, without key pollinators, the human population would collapse in less than a decade.”

“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 Sioux, embodiments of clear vision, speed and single-minded dedication.”

“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 something wrong and throw it away.”

“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.”

“Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible.”

“With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.”

“I moved south when I was 11 years old, moved to England. I've lived in all kinds of places, all parts of England.”

“Once upon a time, forests were repositories of magic for the human race.”

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

“This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures.”

“One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.”

“Thatcherite economic policy was most acutely felt in the coal industry, where tens of thousands of jobs were lost as pits were shut down.”

“'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.”

“The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.”

“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.”