Author

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

From Joseph Brodsky

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

From Joseph Brodsky

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.

From Joseph Brodsky

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.

From Joseph Brodsky

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.'

From Joseph Brodsky

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.

From Joseph Brodsky

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.

From Joseph Brodsky

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

From Joseph Brodsky

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

From Joseph Brodsky

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.

From Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky

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