Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
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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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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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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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A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.
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I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.
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Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
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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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Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
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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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Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.
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Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.
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This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
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A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.
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I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.
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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
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I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved.
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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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This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.
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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
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The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.