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"Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers."
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"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
Explore more quotes by 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!"

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

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

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

"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."
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