Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky; 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 May 1940
CountryUnited States of America
memory substitute
If there is any substitute for love, it is memory
friendship friends delightful
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
education reading book
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
dark would-be figures
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.
dirty book winning
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.
attitude patriotism language
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
reading grief believe
Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
files ifs
Every life has a file, if you will.
education inspiration book
Man is what he reads.
boys opening-up skulls
I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out.
despair form snobbery
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
evil political eating
Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating ...
reading writing thinking
When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
government serious consideration
The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.