Joseph Brodsky
I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
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.
People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
Venice is eternity itself.
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
Life has a great deal up its sleeve.
Bad literature is a form of treason.
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.
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.
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.
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.
An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
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.
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
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.
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.
Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.
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.
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.
I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like claiming to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
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.
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.
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.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
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.
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.
Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.
What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'
Creativity is an unending exercise in uncertainty.Collection: Creativity
The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.Collection: Blame