-
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
Joseph Brodsky -
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Joseph Brodsky
-
Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
Joseph Brodsky -
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.
Joseph Brodsky -
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.
Joseph Brodsky -
The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.
Joseph Brodsky -
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.
Joseph Brodsky -
I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.
Joseph Brodsky
-
Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
Joseph Brodsky -
I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.
Joseph Brodsky -
To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc.
Joseph Brodsky -
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.
Joseph Brodsky -
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.
Joseph Brodsky -
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.
Joseph Brodsky
-
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
Joseph Brodsky -
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Joseph Brodsky -
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
Joseph Brodsky -
Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.
Joseph Brodsky -
When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian, you get almost a psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything. It can help you understand, and it can discourage you, because you see how little can be done.
Joseph Brodsky -
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
Joseph Brodsky
-
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.
Joseph Brodsky -
The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
Joseph Brodsky -
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.
Joseph Brodsky -
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Joseph Brodsky