Top 100 Joseph Brodsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “How delightful to find a friend in everyone.”

— Joseph Brodsky

52. “A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.”

— Joseph Brodsky

53. “The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can’t win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.”

— Joseph Brodsky

54. “Scratch on, my pen: let’s mark the white the way it marks us.”

— Joseph Brodsky

55. “My poems getting published in Russia doesn’t make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I’m not trying to be coy, but it doesn’t tickle my ego.”

— Joseph Brodsky

56. “More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.”

— Joseph Brodsky

57. “I don’t believe in that country any longer. I’m not interested. I’m writing in the language, and I like the language.”

— Joseph Brodsky

58. “Every life has a file, if you will.”

— Joseph Brodsky

59. “I’m 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I’m nothing. By affiliation I’m nothing.”

— Joseph Brodsky

60. “I’m not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.”

— Joseph Brodsky

61. “Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?”

— Joseph Brodsky

62. “It is a virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal out of one’s emotional life. There’s always enough work to do, not to mention that there’s world enough outside.”

— Joseph Brodsky

63. “What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.”

— Joseph Brodsky

64. “If I can get somewhere, I’m all right. If not, I’m miserable.”

— Joseph Brodsky

65. “All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.”

— Joseph Brodsky

66. “Love as content is in the habit of limiting formal patterns. The same goes for faith. After all, there are only so many adequate manifestations for truly strong sentiments; which, in the end, is what explains rituals.”

— Joseph Brodsky

67. “The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin – not even by a minority.”

— Joseph Brodsky

68. “When I’m not writing or reading, I’m thinking about both.”

— Joseph Brodsky

69. “In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.”

— Joseph Brodsky

70. “I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.”

— Joseph Brodsky

71. “What’s wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the speed with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right.”

— Joseph Brodsky

72. “If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.”

— Joseph Brodsky

73. “Nothing reveals a poet’s weakness like classical verse, and that’s why it’s so universally dodged.”

— Joseph Brodsky

74. “I didn’t want to be either the cre’me de la cre’me or a martyr. I’d rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn’t understand the language I write in.”

— Joseph Brodsky

75. “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

76. “If Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.”

— Joseph Brodsky

77. “By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.”

— Joseph Brodsky

78. “A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.”

— Joseph Brodsky

79. “To have another life, one ought to be able to wrap up the first one, and the job should be done neatly.”

— Joseph Brodsky

80. “Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating...”

— Joseph Brodsky

81. “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.”

— Joseph Brodsky

82. “If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore...”

— Joseph Brodsky

83. “There’s nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.”

— Joseph Brodsky

84. “For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.”

— Joseph Brodsky

85. “Still, winter is an abstract season: it is low on colors, even in Italy, and big on the imperatives of cold and brief daylight. These things train your eye on the outside with an intensity greater than that of the electric bulb availing you of your own features in the evening. If this season doesn’t necessarily quell your nerves, it still subordinates them to your instincts; beauty at low temperatures is beauty.”

— Joseph Brodsky

86. “As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep sliding off.”

— Joseph Brodsky

87. “An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.”

— Joseph Brodsky

88. “I’m a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.”

— Joseph Brodsky

89. “Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.”

— Joseph Brodsky

90. “I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.”

— Joseph Brodsky

91. “Who included me among the ranks of the human race?”

— Joseph Brodsky

92. “What paradise and vacation have in common is that you have to pay for both, and the coin is your previous life.”

— Joseph Brodsky

93. “This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.”

— Joseph Brodsky

94. “It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours.” –.”

— Joseph Brodsky

95. “At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn’t be retained by the mind.”

— Joseph Brodsky

96. “I don’t have principles. I have nerves.”

— Joseph Brodsky

97. “I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.”

— Joseph Brodsky

98. “What’s happening in Russia is devoid of autobiographical interest for me. Maybe it’s egocentric. Whatever it is, feel free to use it.”

— Joseph Brodsky

99. “The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.”

— Joseph Brodsky

100. “I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.”

— Joseph Brodsky