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"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."
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"Talent can be a nice thing to have sometimes. You look good, attract attention, and if you're lucky, you make some money. Women flock to you. In that sense, having talent's preferable to having none. But talent only functions when it's supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn. If talent's the foundation you rely on, and yet it's so unreliable that you have no idea what's going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have?"

"Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle."

"What did Citibank get out of it? It got the ability to reverse the arbitrage. Actually, what they got was the ability to give themselves a profit, and that saved the bank."

"I know it is the fans that are responsible for me being here. I've always tried in each and every broadcast to serve the fans to the best of my ability."

"To know how to hide one's ability is great skill."

"Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability."

"I want to sing like Aretha Franklin. Before her I wanted the technical ability of Ella Fitzgerald."

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."
Explore more quotes by Ezra Pound

"Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts."

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

"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."

"The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner."

"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."

"Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."

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