Quotes About Brodsky

In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.

The Last Judgement is the Last Judgement, but a human being who spent his life in Russia, has to be, without any hesitation, placed into Paradise.

Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag]

Ah, how much more soothing (that is to say, if one should get the choice) to be wiped off the earth by hell-bound fiends than by neurotics.

A je?li kto? ci? zapyta kim jeste??, to odpowiedz Ja jestem Nikt - jak rzek? niegdy? Polifemowi Odys.

Brodsky was born in May, 1940, a year before the German invasion. His mother worked as an accountant; his father was a photographer and worked for the Navy Museum in Leningrad when Brodsky was young. They were doting parents and much beloved by Iosif Brodsky, who was their only child.

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

I looked at the empty suitcase. On the bottom was Karl Marx. On the lid was Brodsky. And between them, my lost, precious, only life.

Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow.

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

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

One need not smoke to inhale. The air in bars holds its load of tars in stale suspension. Also jails. Jails are a prison for the person who abhors smoke. But happily gorgeous thought also hangs around like that: you can walk through a mist of Brodsky and contact- exist.

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.

The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.