Joseph Brodsky
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"Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky" was a Russian and American poet and essayist.

Born in Saint Petersburg/Leningrad in 1940, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled ("strongly advised" to emigrate) from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale University/Yale, University of Cambridge/Cambridge and University of Michigan/Michigan.

Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress/United States Poet Laureate in 1991.

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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

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.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.

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

Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.

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 even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.