I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there. -Joseph Brodsky Age
One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee. -Joseph Brodsky Attitude
Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. -Joseph Brodsky Saintpatricksday
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness. -Joseph Brodsky Beauty
American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language. -Joseph Brodsky Patriotism
Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives. -Joseph Brodsky Patriotism
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production. -Joseph Brodsky Poetry
