Top 234 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Brodsky - Page 4

If one's fated to be born in Caesar's Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.

In Russia, the moment a person opens his mouth you know where he's from. There's the uniformity of experience of an individual in Russia. When you're about 7 years old you get into school and you get put in this factory or this bureaucracy or whatever. The options are computable. Here it's tremendously diverse.

The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.

I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.

When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.

The Constitution doesn't mention rain.

Judge: And what is your occupation in general? Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator. Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet? Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity? Judge: Did you study it?...How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an insitute of higher learning...where they prepare...teach Brodsky: I did not think that it is given to one by education. Judge: By what then? Brodsky: I think that it is from God.

I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.

Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.

The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.

I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out.

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.

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.

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.

Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.

In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that. The Holocaust and the consequences of it. Well, I find it terribly boring, predictable and unimportant, because what matters about literature is esthetic achievement.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.

I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating.

As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.

I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.

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 .

Literature sort of makes your daily operation, your daily conduct, the management of your affairs in the society a bit more complex. And it puts what you do in perspective, and people don't like to see themselves or their activities in perspective. They don't feel quite comfortable with that. Nobody wants to acknowledge the insignificance of his life, and that is very often the net result of reading a poem.

It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.

A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.

Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.

In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.

The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.

...boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.

I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.

After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.

I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.

What's happening in Russia is devoid of autobiographical interest for me. Maybe it's egocentric. Whatever it is, feel free to use it.

All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.

As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.

I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.

Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don't think their owners should be grateful to receive them.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)