JOSEPH BRODSKY

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

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

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

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

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.

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Man is what he reads.

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.

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.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

All that remains is was.

That nation where among forests of hands the tyrant of the State, is voted in, its only candidate, And spit goes ice-cold on the tongue

People die as you elect new apostles of neglect.