Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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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 had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
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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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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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The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
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Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
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Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.
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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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This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
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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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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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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
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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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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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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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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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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
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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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Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
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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 imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
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It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.