Matter Quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

— Joseph Brodsky

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

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

— Joseph Brodsky

“In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.”

— Joseph Brodsky

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

Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.

— Joseph Brodsky

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.

— Joseph Brodsky

“What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech”

— Joseph Brodsky

“secrecy is a hotbed of vanity”

— Joseph Brodsky

“The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles”

— Joseph Brodsky

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

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

— Joseph Brodsky

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

— Joseph Brodsky

“If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.”

— Joseph Brodsky