Ezra Pound Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Agents, Way

  Ezra Pound (1968). “Literary Essays of Ezra Pound”, p.6, New Directions Publishing

• The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

  Ezra Pound

  Inspirational, Life, Art

  Ezra Pound (1965). “Ezra Pound perspectives: essays in honor of his eightieth birthday”

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

  Ezra Pound

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Ezra Pound, Michael Dirda (2010). “ABC of Reading”, p.100, New Directions Publishing

• It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

  Ezra Pound

  Fear, Writing, Optimistic

  Ezra Pound (2003). “Poems and Translations”

• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Expression, Land

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound (2009). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.9, Fordham Univ Press

• Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Fundamentals, Crafts

  Ezra Pound, Forrest Read (1967). “Pound/Joyce; the Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce: With Pound's Essays on Joyce”, p.249, New Directions Publishing

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

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Pounds, Language

  Ezra Pound, Marcella Spann (1964). “Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry”, p.338, New Directions Publishing

• Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Musical, Phrases

  Ezra Pound (1968). “Literary Essays of Ezra Pound”, p.3, New Directions Publishing

• The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Adequate, Natural

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Jonathan Stalling, Lucas Klein (2008). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.9, Fordham Univ Press

• I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.

  Ezra Pound

  Moving, Writing, Wind

  Ezra Pound, Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, James Longenbach (1991). “Ezra Pound's poetry and prose: contributions to periodicals”

• 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.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Criticism, Literature

  Ezra Pound (1991). “Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose: 1920-1927, C522-C599a”

• The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

  Ezra Pound

  Letting Go, Country, Children

  "Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry".

• 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

  Writing, Secret, Lap

  Ezra Pound, Michael Dirda (2010). “ABC of Reading”, p.6, New Directions Publishing

• No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

  Ezra Pound

  Real, Book, Writing

  Ezra Pound (1918). “Pavannes and Divisions”

• install me in any profession
  Save this damn'd profession of writing,
  where one needs one's brains all the time.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Brain, Needs

  Ezra Pound (1990). “Personae: The Shorter Poems (Revised Edition)”, p.121, New Directions Publishing

• 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

  Writing, People, Empires

  Ezra Pound, Michael Dirda (2010). “ABC of Reading”, p.34, New Directions Publishing

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