Joseph Brodsky Quotes
-
Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.
-
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
-
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.
-
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
-
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.
-
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
-
Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
-
I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
-
I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
-
English is the only interesting thing that's left in my life.
-
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
-
I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
-
I simply loved all my life; loved is too strong a word, but I had a tremendous sentiment, partly conditioned, of course, by the reality of where I grew up, for the spirit of individualism, for the idea of your being on your own in a big way.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
-
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.