On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

Joseph Brodsky

Space Writer Write

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Joseph Brodsky

Very Ugliness Tie

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

Joseph Brodsky

Education Well Very

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

Joseph Brodsky

Saint Patrick's Day Relationship Family

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Joseph Brodsky

Life Good Worse

Man is what he reads.

Joseph Brodsky

Education T Read

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

Joseph Brodsky

Friendship Very T

An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.

Joseph Brodsky

Us Thing Thin

Venice is eternity itself.

Joseph Brodsky

Venice T Self

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.

Joseph Brodsky

Time Space Age

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.

Joseph Brodsky

Society Art Words

No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.

Joseph Brodsky

Life Your You

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

Joseph Brodsky

Poetry Will Tyranny

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

Joseph Brodsky

Life Wonder Won

I am no parasite.

Joseph Brodsky

T Site Sit

It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

Joseph Brodsky

Men History Art

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

Joseph Brodsky

Work Future Wrote

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

Joseph Brodsky

Space Writer Write

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Men Change Within

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

Joseph Brodsky

Pet Life Art

What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.

Joseph Brodsky

Your You Way

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

Joseph Brodsky

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

Joseph Brodsky

On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.

Joseph Brodsky

Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

Joseph Brodsky

Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.

Joseph Brodsky

In terms of freedom, America doesn't invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.

Joseph Brodsky

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

Joseph Brodsky

Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.

Joseph Brodsky

Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.

Joseph Brodsky

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

Joseph Brodsky

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Joseph Brodsky

I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.

Joseph Brodsky

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.

Joseph Brodsky

A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.

Joseph Brodsky

In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.

Joseph Brodsky

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

Joseph Brodsky

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.

Joseph Brodsky

Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.

Joseph Brodsky

The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.

Joseph Brodsky

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.

Joseph Brodsky

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.

Joseph Brodsky

You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'

Joseph Brodsky

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

Joseph Brodsky

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Joseph Brodsky

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

Joseph Brodsky