Bad politics make for bad morals.
— Joseph Brodsky
I am no parasite.
One belongs to one's language as a writer.
Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.
Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.
Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.
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.
People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
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.
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.
Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
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.
I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.
A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
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.
English is the only interesting thing that's left in my life.
Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets.
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
The literature from which I come is rather large.
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.
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.
One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee.
Time can be an enemy or a friend.
I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.
Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
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.
You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'
Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
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.
What provides you with subject matter is your own language - and that's all.
I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.
Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
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 still writing in Russian.
Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.
In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.
The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.
Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.
Venice is eternity itself.
A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.
The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian, you get almost a psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything. It can help you understand, and it can discourage you, because you see how little can be done.
The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.
Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.
I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.
A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.
