Top 234 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Brodsky - Page 3

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.

A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

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.

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.

Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.

The literature from which I come is rather large.

Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.

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.

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

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.

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.

Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.

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.

I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

I am no parasite.

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.

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.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

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.

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.

Every life has a file, if you will.

Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.

What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.

A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.

If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.

Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

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. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon.

There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those-in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.

Creativity is an unending exercise in uncertainty.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?

The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

I don't have principles. I have nerves.