Harold Bloom Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

  Harold Bloom

  Reading, Writing, People

  "Falstaff for our times". www.theguardian.com. March 5, 1999.

• You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

  Harold Bloom

  Writing, Thinking, Want

• What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.

  Harold Bloom

  Writing, Thinking, Views

  Harold Bloom (2003). “A Map of Misreading”, p.31, Oxford University Press, USA

• Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

  Harold Bloom

  Believe, Writing, Share

  Harold Bloom (2001). “How to Read and Why”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

• The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

  Harold Bloom

  Writing, Class, Ideas

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