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

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

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
Ezra Pound

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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 I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
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

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

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

Literature is news that stays news.
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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Ezra Pound

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

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