“The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.”
― 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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“An ethical man doesn’t need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“How delightful to find a friend in everyone.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn’t take it that seriously.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.’”
― Joseph Brodsky
“You cannot cover a ruin with a page of ‘Pravda.’”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Who included me among the ranks of the human race?”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Venice is eternity itself.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth – none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Translation is not original creation – that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological – indeed, genetic – goal.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Bad literature is a form of treason.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends – they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I simply loved all my life; loved is too strong a word, but I had a tremendous sentiment, partly conditioned, of course, by the reality of where I grew up, for the spirit of individualism, for the idea of your being on your own in a big way.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant’s gates, also.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Man is what he reads.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“For some odd reason, the expression ‘death of a poet’ always sounds somewhat more concrete than ‘life of a poet.’”
― Joseph Brodsky
“After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Life has a great deal up its sleeve.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Literature invents its own rules.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I’m the happiest combination you can think of. I’m a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“My intention is to write poems. That’s what I’ve been doing most of my life.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I’m no parasite. I’m a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it’s something more.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a ‘read,’ commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history’s mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it’s the best possible combination.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“What provides you with subject matter is your own language – and that’s all.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“A writer should care about one thing – the language. To write well – that is his duty. That is his only duty.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Poetry isn’t just different from prose, it’s more important for the human species.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Poems, novels – these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We’re all given to fretting a lot.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“People who buy ‘The National Enquirer’ would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I’m absolutely serious.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Time can be an enemy or a friend.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Yevtushenko is a high member of his country’s establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“The literature from which I come is rather large.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“One belongs to one’s language as a writer.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“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.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“I am no parasite.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Bad politics make for bad morals.”
― Joseph Brodsky
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