Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I allowed artists to play for as long as they felt they could justifiably continue to create.

When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.

I love this freedom that has been given to me as an artist to express myself.

I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds into whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business.

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.

I just write what I write, produce the music I produce and try to give myself a chance to stay true to the art form. If you try to rein in an art form, it can be hurtful to what you are making.

Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.

I'm not here to put my music out on the Internet with no support and then say I got creative freedom. I've got creative freedom wherever I go: I don't create anything that I don't want to create. That's freedom. Since when does a company force you to make something that you don't want to make? If they do that, you leave.

I can only control what I can, which is what I'm able to do as an artist.

We got full artistic integrity and autonomy over what we were doing, and that was the main important thing that kept our band alive.

I like artists to have some freedom.

At the end, we can embrace and love whatever we want of an author's work. But we also can't ignore a writer's express wish just because we don't happen to agree with it.

I always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.

I don't like the notion that artists have a responsibility to be political.

Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy

I want to make decisions as to where I want to go as an artist, and to get to it in my own way

We need to give artists a lot of free room to create.

I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

The right creative act makes its own laws, and always will do.

Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.

A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.

I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction after all comes from a different, less rationally manipulable side of the brain. I am personally very attached to reactionary figures like Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, and Céline.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.