Ezra Pound Literature Quotations

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

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

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

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

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.

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