The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.
— John Burnside
Sometimes, when the wind hits hard and icicles form on the sea cliffs, we can all come together - and at those times, we are at our best.
I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if somewhat routine; nevertheless, in the workaday world, it is wedlock that is most likely to offer the occasion for life-threatening disappointment.
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.
Once upon a time, forests were repositories of magic for the human race.
A forest - the word dates back to the Norman occupancy, when it meant an area set aside for England's violent new masters to hunt boar and deer - is necessarily larger than a wood. It belonged to the king and was a fit place for his recreation.
Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.
Clearly, any well-kept garden will be a source of pleasure in the summer months; in the bleak urban midwinter, however, there are few activities more likely to energise the spirit than a botanical walk.
Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation's ledger books through false accounting.
The conventional, and painfully artificial, separation of the human realm from the natural other is bound to perish, albeit over a period of time, until we are obliged to learn how to cultivate our gardens under the most demanding conditions.
People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself.
You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.
Every time I write a book, I think how I could be doing it better to please people - a nicer book with nicer characters - but I just can't.
The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper.
One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'
In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo's messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of the Lakota Sioux, embodiments of clear vision, speed and single-minded dedication.
There is a red sandy beach in the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia that is unlike any other shore landscape I have ever seen. The world's highest tides wash its shores, and the soft cliffs of Blomidon Provincial Park are constantly crumbling away; whole trees will occasionally slide down to the sea to decay slowly in the wind and brine.
The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.
The fabric of a garden is determined as much by its textures as by its tonal range and architectural flair.
The woods were a boon; all too often, the forest offered danger and mystery. Yet it could be liberating. If you entered that wild place on its own terms, you might be accorded wisdom.
Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible.
A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance of natural form and a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of the world we inhabit.
As a child, I was always intrigued by the question: what is it that distinguishes a city from a town? Is it size? Population? Location? When I asked grown-ups, the confident answer was that a city has to have a cathedral - which, to a child raised in a devout Catholic setting, made sense.
What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor.
'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.
It's important to have quiet time and isolation.
Usually, I would mistrust a book if it took that long to write. Usually, if it isn't done in two years, I suspect there's something wrong and throw it away.
Poetry stands or falls by its music.
What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.
A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself.
Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most elegant phenomena.
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.
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.
I have never understood why so many gardeners favour straight lines and narrow, regulated borders; perhaps they think wildness could work only in a larger space.
Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.
I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.
In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.
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.
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.
My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.
Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.
