Words matter. These are the best Ezra Pound Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
All great art is born of the metropolis.
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
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.
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.
Either move or be moved.
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.
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.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Genius… is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
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.
Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
Good art however ‘immoral’ is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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.
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
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.
Wars are made to make debt.
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
