Joseph Brodsky

“A book is a product of a certain solitude. So is its consumption.”

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

“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.”

“Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment.”

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

“Man is what he reads.”

“A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state.”

“I don't think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is himself.”

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

“A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.”

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

“A song is a form of linguistic disobedience.”

“In the end, one's life is more a matter of taste than of choice.”

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity.”

“One writes out of a need to comprehend, not out of a need to be comprehended.”

“Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate.”

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”