Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

No poem is ever written for its story line's sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obituary. - Joseph Brodsky

A smell is, after all, a violation of oxygen balance, an invasion into it of other elements--methane? carbon? sulphur? nitrogen? Depending on that invasion's intensity, you get a scent, a smell, a stench. It is a molecular affair, and happiness, I suppose, is the moment of spotting the elements of your own composition being free. There were quite a number of them out there, in a state of total freedom, and I felt I'd stepped into my own self-portrait in the cold air.

You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, pearl-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers.

un romanzo o una poesia sono il prodotto di una reciproca solitudine – quella di uno scrittore e quella di un lettore.

Il poeta, ripeto, è il mezzo di cui la lingua si serve per esistere. O, come ha detto il mio amato Auden, è colui in cui e per cui la lingua vive.

Opera and church recitals are options, of course, but they require some initiative and arrangement: tickets and schedules and so forth. I am not good at that; it's rather like fixing a three-course meal for yourself - perhaps even lonelier.

sono certo, certissimo, che un uomo che legge poesia si fa sconfiggere meno facilmente di uno che non la legge.

Inhumanity is always easier to structure than anything else. For that job, Russia never had to import the know-how. In fact, the one way for that country to get rich is to import it.

This city is a real triumph of the chordate, because the eye, our only raw fishlike internal organ, indeed swims here: it darts, flaps, oscillates, dives, rolls up. Its exposed jelly dwells with atavistic joy on reflected palazzi, spiky heels, gondolas, etc., recognizing in the agency that brought them to the surface none other than itself.

Brick and bricklaying somehow ring of an alternative order of flesh, not raw of course, but scarlet enough, and made up of small identical cells.

Still, if it comes to the point where the blue acrylic dappled with cirrus suggests the Lord, say Give me strength to sustain the hurt, and learn it by heart like a decent lyric.

An eyelid is twitching. From the open mouth gushes silence. The cities of Europe mount each other at railroad stations. A pleasant odor of soap tells the jungle dweller of the approaching foe. Wherever you set your sole or toe, the world map develops blank spots, grows balder.

Like the mouse creeping out of the scarlet crack, the sunset gnaws hungrily the electric cheese of the outskirts, erected by those who clearly trust their knack for surviving everything: by termites. Warehouses, surgeries. Having measured there the proximity of the desert, the cinnamon-tinted earth waylays its horizontality in the fake pyramids, porticoes, rooftops' ripple, as the train creeps knowingly, like a snake, to the capital's only nipple.

A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.

This, presumably, means that we are now in league with life.

The upper lip is like a groom, to wit: The lower lip is like his fiancee. But that which splits in two will surely split into two hundred just as easily. And everything that's been twofold is then accountable, is then no longer moot.

There's something bigger in the world than us, a thing that warms us, though it doesn't warm itself

The reason English-speaking readers can hardly tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is because they read neither prose. They're reading Constance Garnett.

We have, all of us, more reasons for staying than for marching. What's the point in marching if you are only going to catch up with a very sad tune?

Had art indeed depended on experience as much as the critical profession wants us to believe, we'd have far more – and far better – art on our hands than we do. A poet is always the product of his – that is, his nation's – language, to which living experiences are what logs are to fire

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.

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.

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.

For a head of state presiding over a ruined economy, an active army with its low wages is god-sent: All he's got to do is provide it with an objective.