Joseph Brodsky

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.

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.

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

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

The real history of consciousness starts with ones first lie.

An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.

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.

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.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

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.'

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.

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

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 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.

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

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Venice is eternity itself.

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.

You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo.

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

What provides you with subject matter is your own language - and that's all.

A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.

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

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

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

Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.

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.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

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.

Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

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.

One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.

Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size the beauty and the ugliness.

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.

Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.

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.

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.

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.

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.

Whether by theft or by artistry or by conquest, when it comes to time, Venetians are the world's greatest experts. They bested time like no one else.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

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.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.

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

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

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.

I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Time can be an enemy or a friend.

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.

Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.

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.

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.

Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

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.

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.

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.

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth.

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.

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.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

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.