Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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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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One belongs to one's language as a writer.
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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.
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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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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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Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.
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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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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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Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
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I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
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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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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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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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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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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.
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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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I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.
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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
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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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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
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This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
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The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
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As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like claiming to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.