Ezra Pound Quotes about Writing

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

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

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.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

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

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.

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

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.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

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.

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

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

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

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.