Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Character begins to form at the first pinch of anxiety about ourselves.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage,
All anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
If the poet tries to split himself in two between the man and the poet, he will invariably commit suicide as an artist.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
My ideas were completely immature. I was simply developing my poetic muscles. I swung alliterations, rhymes, and metaphors like Indian clubs.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
All values in this world are more or less questionable, but the most important thing in life is human kindness.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No Jewish blood runs among my blood,
but I am as bitterly and hardly hated
by every anti-semite
as if I were a Jew. By this
I am a Russian.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
So on and on
we walked without thinking of rest
passing craters, passing fire,
under the rocking sky of '41
tottering crazy on its smoking columns.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No, Stalin did not die.
He thinks that death can be fixed.
We removed
him
from the mausoleum.
But how do we remove Stalin
from Stalin's heirs?

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
There is no Jewish blood in my veins,
But I am hated with a scabby hatred By all the anti-Semites, like a Jew.
And therefore
I am a true Russian.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Great twentieth century: sputnik century:
what an angst is in you, what wide perplexity!
You are a good century and a century of the pit,
cannibal century to the ideas you beget,
century of the angry young men's target.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Time has a way of demonstrating
The most stubborn are the most intelligent.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Over Babiy Yar
there are no memorials.
The steep hillside like a rough inscription.
I am frightened.
Today I am as old as the Jewish race.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko