Joseph Brodsky

“I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.”

“A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.”

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

“When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian, you get almost a psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything. It can help you understand, and it can discourage you, because you see how little can be done.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.”

“One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.”

“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.”

“There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.”

“To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.”

“...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.”

“Bad politics make for bad morals.”

“Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.”

“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.”

“Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.”

“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.”

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

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