Joseph Brodsky Quotes
-
Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.
→ -
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.
→ -
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
→ -
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
→ -
I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.
→ -
If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.
→ -
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
→ -
What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
→ -
The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
→ -
...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
→ -
I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.
→ -
For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
→ -
Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
→ -
I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
→ -
Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
→ -
Bad literature is a form of treason.
→ -
If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.
→ -
I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.
→ -
My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.
→ -
At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.
→ -
Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.
→ -
In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.
→ -
When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.
→ -
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
→ -
As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives .
→ -
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.
→ -
A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.
→ -
I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.
→ -
I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
→ -
Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.
→
Related Authors
-
Osip Mandelstam Poet -
Bulat Okudzhava Poet -
Mikhail Bulgakov Writer -
Yevgeny Yevtushenko Poet -
Anna Akhmatova Poet -
Ivan Bunin Writer -
Alexander Blok Poet -
Vladimir Nabokov Novelist -
Sergei Yesenin Poet -
Andrei Voznesensky Poet -
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Novelist -
Boris Pasternak Poet -
Marina Tsvetaeva Poet -
Maxim Gorky Writer -
Alexander Pushkin Author -
Vladimir Mayakovsky Poet -
Czeslaw Milosz Poet -
Mikhail Baryshnikov Choreographer -
Sergei Dovlatov Journalist -
Mikhail Lermontov Writer