Ezra Pound

“Literature is language charged with meaning”

“I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.”

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

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

“And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Either move or be moved.”

“Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.”

“Listen to me, attend me!And I will breathe into thee a soul,And thou shalt live for ever.”

“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.”

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