Mark Strand Quotes

I don't look like who I am.

We are what we seem to be.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

My photographs don't do me justice - they just look like me.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Very few of us are what we seem.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

I am not what you see and hear.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

The description is not the described.

The whole point of wearing a disguise was to be seen wearing her.

You're never really playing yourself. You're always acting. It's an illusion that you're really playing yourself. The only time I'm playing myself is when I'm at home!

What you see is what you get. What you hear is who I am.

A world view is probably an expression of self.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

People love to see themselves on screen in a way that makes sense and seems on point.

And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.