Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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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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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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I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
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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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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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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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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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One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.
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Literature invents its own rules.
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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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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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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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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 some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
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Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.
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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 writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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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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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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Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.