Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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.

A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.

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

Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating.

I didn’t want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I’d rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn’t understand the language I write in.

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’s partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it’s partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn’t want to oblige.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn’t be happy with.

Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe … that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

I’m a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.

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 quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author’s self-projection.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.