Top 234 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Brodsky
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Joseph Brodsky.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
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.
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
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.
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.
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.
Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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.
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.
My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.
Bad literature is a form of treason.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
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 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.
An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
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.
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 can be an enemy or a friend.
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
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.
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
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.
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
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.
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.
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
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.
Venice is eternity itself.
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.
Man is what he reads.
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Bad politics make for bad morals.
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.
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.
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