Yevgeny Yevtushenko quotes

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)
Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
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
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] 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
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
Envy is an insult to oneself.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable. (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
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
I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people...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.
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
When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
My dear friend Yevtushenko has, I claim, an ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet.
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
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
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)
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
He has a clear style and has had much courage – as in his poem "Babi Yar", a memorial to the Jews murdered by the Nazis. But he is no more than a talented poetaster – which is quite obvious to all but Western journalists – and it would be foolish to consider him as more than a skilful publicist.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko