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.”

“Venice is eternity itself.”

“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.”

“It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.”

“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.”

“Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.”

“Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.”

“As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like claiming to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.”

“Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.”

“Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.”

“The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.”

“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.'”

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

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

“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.”

“Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.”