Famous Quotes by Ezra Pound (63 Quotations)

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

Ezra Pound – [Bohemia]

I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic — I mean my motion.

Ezra Pound – [Exile]

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

Ezra Pound – [Madness]

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

Ezra Pound – [Suicide]

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

Ezra Pound – [Temper]

I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim… lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.

Ezra Pound – [Procreation]

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

Ezra Pound – [Literature]

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

Ezra Pound – [Patronage]

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.

Ezra Pound – [Heresy]

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

Ezra Pound – [Economy and Economics]

It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.

Ezra Pound – [Paradise]

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 – [Imagination]

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 – [Marriage]

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.

Ezra Pound – [Literature]

Literature is news that stays news.

Ezra Pound – [Literature]

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

Ezra Pound – [Complexity]

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.

Ezra Pound – [Churches]

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 clichT, not from real life.

Ezra Pound – [Style]

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

Ezra Pound – [Books and Reading]

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

Ezra Pound – [Writers and Writing]