American - Poet | May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996
People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
Joseph Brodsky
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Time can be an enemy or a friend.
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In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.
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Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.
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On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
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In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.
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It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
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Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.
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The literature from which I come is rather large.
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One belongs to one's language as a writer.
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I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.
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Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
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