Joseph Brodsky

"Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse"

"It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being."

"The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability o…"

"This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpower…"

"The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something…"

"For darkness restores what light cannot repair. There we are married, blest, we make once more the two-backed beast and children are the fair excuse of what we're naked for."

"Last published interview"

"21 English poems by Brodsky"