"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."
"As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state."
11 likes
Source: Joseph Brodsky's Art of Darkness. www.washingtonpost.com. October 23, 1987.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Joseph Brodsky
"Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens."
"Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets."
"How delightful to find a friend in everyone."
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
"A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny."