Ezra Pound

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.

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

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Either move or be moved.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

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.

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

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.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

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

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

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

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

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.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

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.

Utter originality is of course out of the question.