Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
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The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.
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I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.
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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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Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
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Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.
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The literature from which I come is rather large.
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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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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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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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A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.
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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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Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
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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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Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
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Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.
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A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
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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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A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.