Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.
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Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.
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The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.
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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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Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
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The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
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A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth.
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Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
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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.
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Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.
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Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
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The literature from which I come is rather large.
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American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
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What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.
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Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
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Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
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Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.
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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
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The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.
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A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.