John Burnside

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.

I remember how, back in the 1980s, the Scottish Flow Country became an object of bemused controversy as rich celebrities and businessmen from south of the border acquired great tracts of this vast wetland in the far north in order to plant non-native conifer plantations that attract hefty tax breaks.

Given the right information to help them decide, people will opt for conditions that benefit our creaturely neighbours, even where they have no particular interest in larks or cuckoo wasps - because those conditions benefit us.

Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.

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

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

What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor.

I remember playing the Mad Hatter in a school play and feeling very comfortable in the character.

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

I don't like the term 'mental illness.' I'd rather just say 'mad.' Just like I always say 'loony bin,' not 'mental hospital.'

A mad person isn't someone who sees what isn't there; he's someone who sees what is there but that others can't see. I really believe that.

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.