Ezra Pound on reading

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

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.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain1835–1910Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in “Disappearance of Literature”, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain’s Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain1835–1910

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Writing