Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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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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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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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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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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This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
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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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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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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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One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
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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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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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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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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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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
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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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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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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.
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I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.
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The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.