With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.

'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

Thatcherite economic policy was most acutely felt in the coal industry, where tens of thousands of jobs were lost as pits were shut down.

As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.

My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.

My father was this big, tough guy, almost heroic in proportion to me as a child. It was only later that I saw how fearful he was.

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.

My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.

It may be a cliche, but cliche or not, I fear the day when the only marsh harriers or peregrines I can look at are in paintings by Joseph Wolf or Bruno Liljefors - and no matter how beautiful those works may be, life is the great thing: life, life, life.

I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.

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.

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.

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.

What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor.

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.'

Growing up, I learnt to think, 'Let's make it a big night tonight, as you never know what's going to happen next.' So now I have enough, I take too much; when I get the chance to have a fine dinner, I will. And it's had an effect on my health.

I remember a nightfall from childhood, far from home and off the known track: I'd been walking with some older boys, but they ran off and left me, and as darkness hurried in, I suddenly realised how far from home I was.

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.

For 10 years, I gave away my possessions every year and moved on to a new place.

One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.

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.

What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth.

With all the goodwill and local initiative in the world, we are not about to rewild anything until we change our way of thinking about our place in the creaturely world.