Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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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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This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
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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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The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
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Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
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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 is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
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Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.
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Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
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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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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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Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.
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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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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.
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With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
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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 blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.
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Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.
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Life has a great deal up its sleeve.
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No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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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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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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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.