Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.

It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.

No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.

Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.

Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.

In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.

I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.

A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth.

Whether by theft or by artistry or by conquest, when it comes to time, Venetians are the world's greatest experts. They bested time like no one else.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

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

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

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

On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.

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

To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc.