"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."
"As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history."
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Source: Joseph Brodsky, Cynthia L. Haven (2002). “Joseph Brodsky: Conversations”, p.98, Univ. Press of Mississippi
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