Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse,… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman,… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.' — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
