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.
Interpretation
To truly adapt to a new country, one must develop a deep appreciation for its culture or opportunities.
Joseph Brodsky emphasizes that the essence of integrating into a new country lies in finding something to love about it. This could be its laws, economic possibilities, rich history, language, or literature. Without this emotional or intellectual connection, the experience of living in a foreign place may feel hollow or unfulfilling.
In practice
In a speech about cultural integration at a local community center.
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.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like to say, 'I spend one-third of my time in Nigeria, one-third in Europe or America, and one-third on a plane.'
When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.
By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.
What is it we want out of travel? Is it to take snapshots of ourselves in front of famous monuments, surrounded by other tourists? To eat unfamiliar food chosen from unintelligible menus? To earn frequent-flier miles? No. It's to glimpse what life is like somewhere else.
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