It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations.… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that.… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.” — 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
