Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
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My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.
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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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Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
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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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What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
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The literature from which I come is rather large.
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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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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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Time can be an enemy or a friend.
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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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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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Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.
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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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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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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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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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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.