Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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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 should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
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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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A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.
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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 real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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Time can be an enemy or a friend.
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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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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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An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
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What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
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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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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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People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
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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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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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I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
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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.
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One belongs to one's language as a writer.
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In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.
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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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I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.