Ezra Pound Quotes

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

• 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.

  Ezra Pound

• 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

• 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

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

  Ezra Pound

• 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

• If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

  Ezra Pound

• 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.

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

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

  Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (100)

Birth:	30th October, 1885
Death:	1st November, 1972
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Poet

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Today's Anniversary - 6th January

Births

• 1762 - Nathaniel Smith
• 1882 - Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn
• 1984 - A. J. Hawk
• 1960 - Nigella Lawson
• 1963 - Philippe Perrin

Deaths

• 1882 - Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
• 1901 - Philip Armour
• 1919 - Max Heindel
• 1993 - Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev
• 1981 - A. J. Cronin