Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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Joseph Brodsky

Profession : Poet

Birth : May 24, 1940

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

Joseph Brodsky

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

Joseph Brodsky

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.

Joseph Brodsky

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

Joseph Brodsky

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.

Joseph Brodsky

In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.

Joseph Brodsky

Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.

Joseph Brodsky

One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

The literature from which I come is rather large.

Joseph Brodsky

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

Joseph Brodsky

I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.

Joseph Brodsky

Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.

Joseph Brodsky