Joseph Brodsky Zitate – Sprüche auf Englisch mit Übersetzung

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Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.

Joseph Brodsky

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

Joseph Brodsky

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

Joseph Brodsky

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Joseph Brodsky

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

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.

Joseph Brodsky

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

Joseph Brodsky

No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.

Joseph Brodsky

Man is what he reads.

Joseph Brodsky

Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.

Joseph Brodsky

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Whether by theft or by artistry or by conquest, when it comes to time, Venetians are the world's greatest experts. They bested time like no one else.

Joseph Brodsky

The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.

Joseph Brodsky

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

Joseph Brodsky

What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.

Joseph Brodsky

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

Joseph Brodsky

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.

Joseph Brodsky

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

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.

Joseph Brodsky

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

Joseph Brodsky

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

Joseph Brodsky

I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.

Joseph Brodsky

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

Joseph Brodsky

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

English is the only interesting thing that's left in my life.

Joseph Brodsky

In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.

Joseph Brodsky

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.

Joseph Brodsky

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

Joseph Brodsky

By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.

Joseph Brodsky

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

Joseph Brodsky

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.

Joseph Brodsky

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

A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

Joseph Brodsky