Quotes from Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

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

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

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.

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

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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

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

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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

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

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

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

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

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

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.

He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.