John Burnside Quotes

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I write - and then I write some more.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

I write what's given me to write.

I still write the same way and have the same perspective.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.

Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.