Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

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

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 should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

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 belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

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.

I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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