Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Author Image

Joseph Brodsky

Profession : Poet

Birth : May 24, 1940

I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Joseph Brodsky

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.

Joseph Brodsky

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

Joseph Brodsky

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.'

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.

Joseph Brodsky

Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky