EZRA POUND

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

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

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.

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

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

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

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

All great art is born of the metropolis.

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

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

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

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Wars are made to make debt.

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.

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

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