John Burnside Quotes

As I grow older, I have a growing curiosity about my other half. My dad did a wonderful job raising me, and I wouldn't change it for the world, but at the same time there is a growing curiosity about my other half.

My mom really raised me, so I took her name before I ever thought about having a career. It was for personal reasons. My birth name is actually Max Deitch.

I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.

Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.

I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.

I am a product of my father's work.

Well, I didn't feel that I could do justice to this story of my parents and their generation, and all that they did to make it possible for me to be who I am, if I sort of just put it at the beginning of a book about my last eight years in foreign policy.

I think a lot of what I was taught, gathered, and learned is worth keeping. Heritage and "wisdom" and simply personal family and local history enrich the one able to tap such information. As it is I wish I had garnered more from my grandparents and parents.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

I got blessed from my mom. She's the personality; she's the one who smiled, so I took on part of her, and who also wanted to help and save the world. Then I took on part of my dad, who is tough.

I'd always assumed that I would die at about the same age as my dad - he was 45. I am five years in credit now. I can't get my head around the fact that I am older than he was - ever.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.

I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father's side - a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I've often been cast in exotic roles - Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

Dad's Jewish and Irish, Mom's German and Scotch. I couldn't say I was anything. My last name isn't even Downey. My dad changed his name when he wanted to get into the Army and was underage. My real name is Robert Elias. I feel like I'm still looking for a home in some way.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

My grandfather, Harry, died when my dad was in his early 20s, so I never met him. Amazingly, he was 6ft tall. That gene definitely never filtered down to me!

What I said to my family is, 'Our history is our own. Let people write what they want, we know who we are.'

Being a parent gives you historical perspective. You have thoughts about how you fit into a larger generational drama - those who came before and those who will come after.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.