Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.
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What provides you with subject matter is your own language - and that's all.
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Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
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After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
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Venice is eternity itself.
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Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
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By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.
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Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
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What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'
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It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
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I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.
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By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.
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Man is what he reads.
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American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.
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I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
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In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.
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Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
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I am no parasite.
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I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.
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You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'
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For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
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The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.