Wars are made to make debt.
Literature is news that stays news.
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
Don’t be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
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.
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.