"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."
"Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language."
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Source: Joseph Brodsky's Art of Darkness. www.washingtonpost.com. October 23, 1987.
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"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."