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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
Ezra Pound -
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
Ezra Pound
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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 -
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
Ezra Pound -
Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
Ezra Pound -
Small talk comes from small bones.
Ezra Pound -
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound -
The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
Ezra Pound
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Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
Ezra Pound -
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.
Ezra Pound -
Presentation, not reference.
Ezra Pound -
To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.
Ezra Pound -
What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
Ezra Pound -
The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound -
It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
Ezra Pound -
No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound -
The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
Ezra Pound -
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Ezra Pound -
The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.
Ezra Pound
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Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
Ezra Pound -
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound -
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
Ezra Pound -
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
Ezra Pound