It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
Ezra PoundRead
All great art is born of the metropolis.
Interpretation
Great art emerges from the vibrant and complex environment of urban life.
The quote by Ezra Pound suggests that the most significant and influential forms of art are often a reflection of the dynamics and experiences found in city life. Metropolises, being centers of culture, diversity, and innovation, serve as fertile ground for artistic expression, inspiring artists to create works that resonate with the complexities of human experience in urban settings.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the influence of city life on modern art movements.
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
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.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
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.
If you're making music, you must want to turn other people on to it, whether you're number one in the charts or number 60. I don't know, that's a commercial thing, but just the fact that other people like you... there's no point in making music, otherwise. Otherwise, you might as well make it in your bedroom and leave it there.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
If your depiction of loss doesn't make the reader feel loss, then you didn't depict it right.
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