Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (/ˈbrɒdski/; Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский [ɪˈosʲɪf ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈbrotskʲɪj] ( listen); 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist.
I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.
In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
I don't have principles. I have nerves.
For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.
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.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U. S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
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.
As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.
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 neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
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.
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.
Poetry is what is gained in translation.
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.
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.