Top 100 Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Joseph Brodsky Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical devi

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
Joseph Brodsky
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Joseph Brodsky
The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
Joseph Brodsky
Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it’s something more.
Joseph Brodsky
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
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
I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
Joseph Brodsky
A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.
Joseph Brodsky
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Joseph Brodsky
What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
Joseph Brodsky
Venice is eternity itself.
Joseph Brodsky
Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history’s mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.
Joseph Brodsky
Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Joseph Brodsky
Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.
Joseph Brodsky
Poetry isn’t just different from prose, it’s more important for the human species.
Joseph Brodsky
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends – they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
Joseph Brodsky
Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
Joseph Brodsky
The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.
Joseph Brodsky
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan… In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
Joseph Brodsky
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Joseph Brodsky
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those – in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
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
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
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
You cannot cover a ruin with a page of ‘Pravda.’
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
In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.
Joseph Brodsky
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
Joseph Brodsky
Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Joseph Brodsky
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
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
The literature from which I come is rather large.
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
After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
Joseph Brodsky
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Joseph Brodsky
Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal – however permanent it may be – than the creative process itself, the process of composition.
Joseph Brodsky
Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.
Joseph Brodsky
My idea is simply – is very simple – is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.
Joseph Brodsky
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Joseph Brodsky
Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant’s gates, also.
Joseph Brodsky
Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
Joseph Brodsky
By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.
Joseph Brodsky
Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.
Joseph Brodsky
It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.
Joseph Brodsky
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky
Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn’t know the way it’s going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.
Joseph Brodsky
No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.
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
People who buy ‘The National Enquirer’ would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I’m absolutely serious.
Joseph Brodsky
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it’s the best possible combination.
Joseph Brodsky
Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
Joseph Brodsky
One belongs to one’s language as a writer.
Joseph Brodsky
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Joseph Brodsky
Literature invents its own rules.
Joseph Brodsky
Time can be an enemy or a friend.
Joseph Brodsky
I was fortunate enough to write about things I really l

I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.
Joseph Brodsky
One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.
Joseph Brodsky
The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.
Joseph Brodsky
I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Joseph Brodsky
Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.
Joseph Brodsky
Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.
Joseph Brodsky
A writer should care about one thing – the language. To write well – that is his duty. That is his only duty.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
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