Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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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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Time can be an enemy or a friend.
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Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
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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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The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
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A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.
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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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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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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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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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Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
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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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Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.
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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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Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
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Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
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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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I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
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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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Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
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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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I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.
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For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.
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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.