Ezra Pound's Quotes

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

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.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

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

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

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

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.

The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

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

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

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

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

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

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.

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.

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.

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.