Joseph Brodsky Quotes

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's ...

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot o...

Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than yo...

One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art,...

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly...

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodime...

My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater ...

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolute...

... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, part...

Men canreturn to where they have done evil deeds,but men do not return to where they’ve beenabased. ...

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in politi...

When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things un...

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poe...

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but ...

Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already exper...

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only i...

Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A p...

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the...

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is... In any case, I alwa...

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls i...

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to expr...

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot -...

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic ...

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Man is what he reads.