Joseph Brodsky said this quote

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

~ Joseph Brodsky

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

~ Joseph Brodsky

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

~ Joseph Brodsky

Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time.

~ Joseph Brodsky