Joseph Brodsky

"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."

"If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal."

"It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything."

"How delightful to find a friend in everyone."

"Who included me among the ranks of the human race?"

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

"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."

"One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee."

"A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth."

"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."

"Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family."

"In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer."

"When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open."

"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. Suffer them if you can’t escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists..."

"Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo."

"Men canreturn to where they have done evil deeds,but men do not return to where they’ve beenabased. On this point God’s design and ourown feeling of abasement coincideso absolutely that we quit: the night,the rotting beast, the exultant mobs, our homes,our hearthfires, Bacchus in a vacant lotembracing Ariadne in the dark."

"[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you."

"Man is what he reads."

"[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis."

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."