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Harold Bloom Quotes about Writing

All Harold Bloom Quotes Art Criticism Giving Literature Past Pleasure Reading Solitude Study Writing quotes
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

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.

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

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

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

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

Harold Bloom
Writing, Class, Ideas

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