Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.

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

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted . Basically, talent doesn't need history.

T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

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.

Judge: And what is your occupation in general? Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator. Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet? Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity? Judge: Did you study it?...How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an insitute of higher learning...where they prepare...teach Brodsky: I did not think that it is given to one by education. Judge: By what then? Brodsky: I think that it is from God.

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

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

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

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.

love is an attitude toward reality – usually of someone finite toward something infinite.

and love, as an act, lacks a verb

Buenas noches. Don't mind the roaches.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one's drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

If one's fated to be born in Caesar's Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore...

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.

I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.