Yevgeny Yevtushenko quotes

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a renowned Russian poet, novelist, and public figure, celebrated for his powerful and socially engaged poetry. His works offered bold critiques of Soviet society and explored universal human themes. He inspired generations with his courage, artistry, and advocacy for freedom of expression. Here are 31 of his 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. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves? View quote
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! View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Envy is an insult to oneself. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
My dear friend Yevtushenko has, I claim, an ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet. View quote
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. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage. View quote
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. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics. View quote
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. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko