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.
There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.
I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.
When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.
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