John Burnside Love Quotations

I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.

Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she was tall, slender, very dark: an intelligent, sly girl possessed of what I think of now, though I didn't think of then, as a kind of debatable beauty.

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.