Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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Joseph Brodsky

Profession : Poet

Birth : May 24, 1940

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.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

Time can be an enemy or a friend.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.

Joseph Brodsky

Life has a great deal up its sleeve.

Joseph Brodsky

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

Joseph Brodsky

It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

Joseph Brodsky

Venice is eternity itself.

Joseph Brodsky

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.

Joseph Brodsky

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

Joseph Brodsky