Quotes by Pound, Ezra

"The jargon of these 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."

Pound, Ezra on sculptures   

"'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two."

Pound, Ezra on knowledge   

"No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and clich?, not from real life."

Pound, Ezra on style   

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

Pound, Ezra on bohemia   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on books - classics   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on books - reading   

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

Pound, Ezra on books - reading   

"With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands."

Pound, Ezra on books - reading   

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

Pound, Ezra on suicide   

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

Pound, Ezra on techniques   

"I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible."

Pound, Ezra on temper   

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

Pound, Ezra on translation   

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

Pound, Ezra on war
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"Wars are made to make debt."

Pound, Ezra on war
3 fans of this quote   

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

Pound, Ezra on writers and writing   

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

Pound, Ezra on writers and writing   

"The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort."

Pound, Ezra on action   

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

Pound, Ezra on churches   

"Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood."

Pound, Ezra on churches   

"All great art is born of the metropolis."

Pound, Ezra on life   

"A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values."

Pound, Ezra on civilization   

"Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity."

Pound, Ezra on complexity   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on criticism