Joseph Brodsky
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.Collection: Saint
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.Collection: Poetry
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.Collection: Attitude
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.Collection: Space
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.Collection: Beauty
Man is what he reads.Collection: Education
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.Collection: Education
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Age
I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.Collection: Patriotism
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.Collection: Poetry
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?Collection: Funny
You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'
I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.
By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.
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.
Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.
A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.
I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
Time can be an enemy or a friend.
In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.
Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.
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.
The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.
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.
In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.
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.
Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.
The literature from which I come is rather large.
One belongs to one's language as a writer.
I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.
Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
I am no parasite.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
Bad politics make for bad morals.
I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved.
For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'
After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
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.
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.
I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.
Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
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.
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.