All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born

— John Burnside

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…

— John Burnside

Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at home(p. 83-84)

— John Burnside

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

— John Burnside

If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big house, or the fancy car, assuming you had such things. It wouldn't be your impeccable reputation, or fame, or the regard of others. No; if you had to lose everything – I mean EVERYTHING – it would be the things you most take for granted now that you would miss. It would be different for each person, and it would probably surprise you to know what it was: a lilac tree in flower, the sound of a train in the distance, the smell of marmalade or hot buttered toast. Rain on a windowpane. A fruit thingummy.

— John Burnside

I realized I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.

— John Burnside

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.

— John Burnside

It's laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision. No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible. All the time, I knew where I was going, the elements of my fulfillment or ruin were always present; I only had to work my way into that seam of desire and find the hidden vein of dross or gold. It's not a question of predestination, it's just that free will and destiny are illusions, false opposites, consolations. In the end, they are one and the same: a single process. You choose what you choose, and it could not have been otherwise: the choice is destiny. It was there all along, but any alternative you might have considered is an absurd diversion, because it is in your nature to make one choice rather than another. That is identity. To speak of freedom or destiny is absurd because it suggests there is something outside yourself, directing your life, where really it is of the essence: identity, the craft work of the soul.

— John Burnside

My father was one of those men who sit in a room, and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside, p. 27]

— John Burnside

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.

— John Burnside