Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.

I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.

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.

I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved.

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

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

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 .

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

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.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.

Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.

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

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.