What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Man is what he reads.
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
Venice is eternity itself.
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
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.
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.
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
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.
I am no parasite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
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.
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
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.
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
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.
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.
I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
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.
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.
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.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.
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.
A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.
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.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
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.
The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
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.
One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.
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.
You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
