Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.
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American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
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It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.
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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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People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
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Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
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Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.
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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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The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
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Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
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By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
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Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.
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Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
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Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.
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An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
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Time can be an enemy or a friend.
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One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
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Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.
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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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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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One belongs to one's language as a writer.
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No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.