When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.
Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.
The starters of crazes. Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old. He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer.
. Ezra Pound
This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to...
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David Levithan
Some moments are nice, some arenicer, some are even worthwritingabout.
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Charles Bukowski
Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.
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Sylvia Plath
There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.
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Shannon L. Alder
When you're missing a peice of yourself, aching, gut wrenching emptiness begins to take over. Until you find the link that completes your very soul, the feeling will never go away. Most people find a way to fill this void, material possessions, a string of...
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Jennifer Salaiz
More Quotes By Ezra Pound
When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn't otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.
Nothing was working, and my friend was dead, and I didn't want to look at that.
Give her the continent and she wanted the hemisphere.
A certain amount of volatility and drama can me healthy and keep things fun and interesting if you're willing at any moment during a fight to say, 'This means nothing. I love you, let's forget about it.
That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That's...
