Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

I want to write books that can truly become a legacy and bring benefits to people.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.

If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.

Queen Latifah was writing poetry. Maybe Latifah's 'Ladies First' and Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' are the same thing, a generation apart.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I've inspired a few people one way or another.

I have certain viewpoints that come out in certain shayaris.

No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.

I've written poetry most of my life.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

Poetry is the breath of beauty.

There are other great writers who are not read properly in their own day for the reason, perhaps, that their readers are not yet born. What they have to say to their own generation is said so at cross-purposes and with such apparent irrelevance that it is not understood. They are, as it were, giants who tower above their own age to cast their shadows across the next.