Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Life has a great deal up its sleeve.
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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 began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.
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English is the only interesting thing that's left in my life.
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Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.
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Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
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Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.
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On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.
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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.
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The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.
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One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.
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I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
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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.
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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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One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee.
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To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.
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There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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Whether by theft or by artistry or by conquest, when it comes to time, Venetians are the world's greatest experts. They bested time like no one else.
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If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.