Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.
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.
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.
Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.
After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.
What's happening in Russia is devoid of autobiographical interest for me. Maybe it's egocentric. Whatever it is, feel free to use it.
Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.
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.
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
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.
Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.
I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.
When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.
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.
I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
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.
Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.
For a head of state presiding over a ruined economy, an active army with its low wages is god-sent: All he's got to do is provide it with an objective.
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.
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.
To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.
Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.
Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.
To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc.
Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.
The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.
Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
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.
If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.
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.
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.