Yevtushenko Quotes & Sayings

They tell me, shaking their heads:
"You should be kinder. You are somehow furious".
I used to be kind. It didn't last long. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

When there is freedom of speech, I've found that the majority of people really have nothing to say. — 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

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

Who never knew the price of happiness will not be happy. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Justice is like a train that is nearly always late. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I sing and drink,
giving no thought to death;
with arms outspread
I fall upon the grass,
and if, in this wide world, I come to die,
then it's certain to be
from sheer joy that I live. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

True sport is always a duel, a duel with nature, with one's own fear, with one's own fatigue, a duel in which the body and the mind are strengthened. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko 's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence. — Dmitri Shostakovich

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'
Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him. — Kingsley Amis

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

Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht. You can throw everything into it beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, everything you want. What's important is the result, the taste of the borscht. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

He watched through a crack inside just pretending to be dead he wanted to fix each pallbearer in his memory ... it seems to me a telephone was installed in the coffin to someone yet again Stalin is sending his instructions. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Envy is an insult to oneself. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course. — James Fenton

How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

There is no need to fear the strong. All one needs is to know the method of overcoming them. There is a special jujitsu for every strong man. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she'll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love's happiness,
she'll run dripping upstairs, she won't knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

One day posterity will remember these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No Jewish blood runs among my blood,but I am as bitterly and hardly hatedby every anti-semiteas if I were a Jew. By thisI am a Russian. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

And how I flattered myself
From time to time with proving to myself
Nothing in you could be unknown to me.
You don't belong to the mind's calculations,
And you disproved each of my demonstrations,
Since to be unexpected is your truth. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one! — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Here we have some people who call themselves Christians and they forget Jesus Christ was a Jew. Something like anti-Semitism is an artificial way of avoiding responsibility. You blame the problems in your country on someone else, on some group. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful. — 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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No one sleeps more beautifully than you. But i am afraid that you will waken just now, and touch me with an indifferent glance, lightly passing, and commit the murder of beauty. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

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

I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Life is a rainbow which also includes black. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

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

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet. — Allen Tate