What provides you with subject matter is your own language - and that's all.
Interpretation
Your unique language and perspective are the sources of your creativity and expression.
This quote by Joseph Brodsky emphasizes the idea that the essence of your art or writing comes from your personal experience and the way you articulate it. It suggests that individuality and the unique use of language are crucial in creating meaningful subject matter, asserting that one's own voice is the foundation upon which all creative work is built.
In practice
In a speech about artistic integrity, one might quote Brodsky to emphasize the importance of personal voice.
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.
He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.
Give me a guitar and I'll play; give me a stage and I'll perform; give me an auditorium and I'll fill it.
It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.
I always wrote. I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the '80s developing my craft as a writer.
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