Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing; yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Despair, Knowledge
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
—Ezra Pound
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
—Ezra Pound
There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, “It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.”
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Music
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Intelligence
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Reading, Books
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Authors & Writing
There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle “promise” from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Death
It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Imagination
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature, Books
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Originality
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Freedom
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.
—Ezra Pound
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books
Genius … is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practised, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
—Ezra Pound
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.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Marriage
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Belief
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Innovation
The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Intelligence
We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: The Past, Past
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Christianity
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Education
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Civilization
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Talent
Literature is news that stays news.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Racism, Race
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Cities, City Life
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stanley Kunitz American Poet
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Rod McKuen American Entertainer
- Aaron Copland American Composer
- Marianne Moore American Poet
- Czeslaw Milosz Polish-American Poet, Novelist
- John Cage American Composer
- Henry Adams American Historian
- Ernest Hemingway American Author
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