Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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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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Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
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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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Bad politics make for bad morals.
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I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
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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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Bad literature is a form of treason.
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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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For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'
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Literature invents its own rules.
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My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.
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Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
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Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.
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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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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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Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.
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In terms of freedom, America doesn't invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.
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Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.
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For a head of state presiding over a ruined economy, an active army with its low wages is god-sent: All he's got to do is provide it with an objective.
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The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations.
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A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.