The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.
— Joseph Brodsky
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like claiming to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc.
It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.
For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'
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.'
I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
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.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.
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.
A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.
I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.
Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
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.
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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.
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.
I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved.
Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.
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.
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.
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
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.
Bad literature is a form of treason.
Man is what he reads.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
