Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon… — 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
What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come… — 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
