John Burnside Quotes

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

The inner artist is not the voice of reason. The inner artist can have wild and impossible ideas... The inner artist is not the voice of comfort.

For once, you're going to hear something that doesn't fit into your neat, compartmentalized world of order and logic and reason.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Life is weird, great and dangerous.

And for me, the real world involves everything: risk, danger, beauty, energy, all we meet with in the real world.

Experiments were not attempted at that time, we did not believe in the usefulness of the concept anyway, and I finished my thesis in 1962 with a feeling like an artist balancing on a high rope without any interested spectators.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger.

I think irrationality is one of the scariest things in the world.

Life is beautiful but people are crazy.

Some of the best ideas that we've invested in have made no sense to conventional sources.

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

The Middle East is so constructed that the rational things are the things least likely to occur.

The 21st century does not like tidy minds.

Life, to me, doesn't feel like a straightforward story; it doesn't make sense for me to get up there and just tell a story. Life feels like what my show feels like: chaotic and strange and disconnected.

I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.

People who express themselves in paradoxes are in a strong position; and the more outrageous the paradox, in general the stronger the position.

Being a parent is beautiful chaos and not at all like how you imagine.

I think we all have a little crazy in us.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.