Explore Quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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

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.

The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.

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.

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

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

Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

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.

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