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.
When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That's my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.
I was growing up and maturing at a time where we were invisible, man. We were nowhere except negative. Any time you saw a Latin person in Hollywood or on TV, they were some sort of negative character.
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.
It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.
All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.
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