A Quote by Joseph Brodsky

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Joseph Brodsky

Quote Topics

Bad Form Literature Treason

Quote Author

Joseph Brodsky
American - Poet
May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996

If you begin to have a relationship where you're doing what the guards want, and once you're out you will see that as a treason, a treason to your country, a treason to yourself, a treason to everybody, so you have to be very cautious on what is the perspective you're looking at yourself, and you have always to see yourself like from the outside.

Ingrid Betancourt

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

Italo Calvino

It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.

Rumaan Alam

The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.

Thomas Carlyle

Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason.

John Harington

I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason.

Cato the Younger

During President George W. Bush's two terms, you couldn't drive far without seeing a particular bumper sticker: Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Now that Democrats control the White House and Congress, the left treats dissent as the lowest form of treason.

Monica Crowley

For myself, I care not whether treason be committed North or South; he that is guilty of treason is entitled to a traitor's fate!

Andrew Johnson

Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence.

Edmund Burke

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

Oscar Wilde

The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do.

Kurt Vonnegut

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

Edward Abbey

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

Juan Goytisolo

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

George Saunders

Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.