Criticism in the universities, Ill have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. Its Stalinism without Stalin. – Harold Bloom
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 – Harold Bloom
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic. – Harold Bloom
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough that we need to know ourselves better that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. – Harold Bloom
Heres my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books, because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket, then theres this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering. – Carl Hiaasen