Ezra Pound

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

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

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.

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

And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.

Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Literature is news that stays news.

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

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

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.

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