Quotes By Ezra Pound

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Either move or be moved.

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Literature is news that stays news.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

Wars are made to make debt.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.