Top 25 Quotes by Mark Strand

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 surprising that so much poetry is written.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

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 submissions.

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 direction of the poem.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

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 its shape.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

It's very hard to write humor.