Quotes by Joseph Brodsky
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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.
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.
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.
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Bad literature is a form of treason.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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.
Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook."
