Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.

Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.

I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

Bad politics make for bad morals.

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

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

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

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

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

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

The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.

Man is what he reads.