Quotes by Joseph Brodsky

About Joseph Brodsky:

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian poet and essayist.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Joseph Brodsky

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Joseph Brodsky

Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are ...

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

... Now to die of grief would mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomers are unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Man is what he reads.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Joseph Brodsky

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Joseph Brodsky

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

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

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.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Joseph Brodsky

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

Joseph Brodsky

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Joseph Brodsky

Author Bio

  • NameJoseph Brodsky
  • DescriptionRussian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate
  • BornMay 24, 1940
  • DiedJanuary 28, 1996
  • CountryRussia; United States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Translator; Essayist; Writer
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Guggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Rome Prize