Quotes by Joseph Brodsky

• Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
• 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.
• Man is what he reads.
• The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
• Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
• Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
• What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
• This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
• Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
• After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
• The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
• Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
• It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
• I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
• How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
• For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
• A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
• Bad literature is a form of treason.
• It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
• For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.
• For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
• Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.