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.
Category Archive: Joseph Brodsky
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.
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Bad literature is a form of treason.
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.
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.
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.