Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
It’s not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
An ethical man doesn’t need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
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.
A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We’re all given to fretting a lot.
For a head of state presiding over a ruined economy, an active army with its low wages is god-sent: All he’s got to do is provide it with an objective.
English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life.
Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.
Translation is not original creation – that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn’t seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.
I’m the happiest combination you can think of. I’m a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse – though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.
Yevtushenko is a high member of his country’s establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.
I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.
Man is what he reads.
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.
I am no parasite.
What provides you with subject matter is your own language – and that’s all.
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem… some strategy in order to pave the reader’s way to the impact of this or that line.
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.
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical – their data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
In terms of freedom, America doesn’t invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.
I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.
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