“It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history.”

“Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write better Russian than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly. For these characters civilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. This wasn’t, as it would seem, another lost generation. This was the only generation of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelstam were more imperative than their own personal destinies. Poorly dressed yet somehow still elegant…broken, growing old, they still retained their love for the non-existent (or existing only in their balding heads) thing called ‘civilization.”

“Judge: And what is your occupation in general?Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator.Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet?Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity?Judge: Did you study it?...How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an insitute of higher learning...where they prepare...teachBrodsky: I did not think that it is given to one by education.Judge: By what then?Brodsky: I think that it is from God.”

“Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.”

“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.”

“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.”

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