The New York Times (14 March 1982)
“I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times.”
Paris Review Interview (1998)
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Mark Strand 14
Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator 1934–2014Related quotes
“I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.”
"I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist" (2008)
Context: So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?
More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?
Me, actually — the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.
It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.
I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.
'Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo's Undisclosed Underworld' by David Remnick, The New Yorker, September 15, 1997
The Paris Review interview
Context: Poems get to the point where they are stronger than you are. They come up from some other depth and they find a place on the page. You can never find that depth again, that same kind of authority and voice. I might feel I would like to change something about them, but they’re still stronger than I am and I cannot.
Ringo Rama promotional interview with Jody Denberg (July 2003) http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/jodyringorama.html
Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
"A Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1839). Source: Thomas de Quincy. On Murder (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 84
Betsy Pickle (June 1, 1997) "Redefining Himself, On and Off-Camera", The Knoxville News-Sentinel, p. T4.