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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

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Ezra Pound
Age: 87 †
Born: 1885
Born: October 30
Died: 1972
Died: November 1
Autobiographer
Composer
Economist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Radio Personality
Translator
Writer
Hailey
Idaho
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Ezra Loomis Pound
Given
Strain
Writing
Page
Never
Popular
Pages
Reader
Slack
Secret
Habitually
Attention
Lap
Common
Whatsoever

More quotes by Ezra Pound

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In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.
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As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
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The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
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Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit
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What counts is the cultural level
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Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
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Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
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Liberty is not a right but a duty.
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Glance is the enemy of vision.
Ezra Pound
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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
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A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
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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.
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
Ezra Pound
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Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
Ezra Pound
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There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth to disentangle promise from achievement to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
Ezra Pound
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound
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Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
Ezra Pound
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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
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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.
Ezra Pound