Mark Strand Quotes

55 quotes in 730 categories

• A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as…
• A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
• And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the…
• But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.
• I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
• I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
• Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
• Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
• The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of…
• There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
• And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is…
• I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part…
• I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's…
• It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely…
• I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical,
• To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
• Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
• Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come…
• Each moment is a place you've never been.
• Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

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