John Burnside Quotes

I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

Even as a little kid, I told lots of stories, and I wrote them down, and I loved reading fiction and fantasy.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

I love using my imagination. I love writing about animals.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you're a kid and you're reading stories.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I like short stories.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.