Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

Joseph Brodsky

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Joseph Brodsky

I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

Man is what he reads.

Joseph Brodsky

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

Joseph Brodsky

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky