I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.
On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.
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.
I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.
I am no parasite.
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.
Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.
Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.
Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.
An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.