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"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."
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Exlpore more Work quotes
"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."
"A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth."
"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."
"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary."
"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God's hand, as they came, as 'accidents'. But in the second week he is beginning to 'know the ropes': by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered."
"How many a rustic Milton has passed by Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies no longer tameless then To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!"
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."
"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."
"Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."
"Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."
"The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting."
"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."
"I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown."
"But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."
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