Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

My music is a very personal reflection of me, whereas, acting a role, that's a reflection of another character.

I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It's really what I love and what I care about.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

Through art, you create your own world.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.