“What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.”
More from Harold Bloom on Writing
“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
“Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden”
“Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes”
“One reads for oneself and for strangers.”
“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
“All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”