Joseph Brodsky

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

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.

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.

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

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

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.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

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.

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

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.

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