“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
More from Harold Bloom on Writing
“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.”
“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“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“Literature is language charged with meaning”
Nora Roberts
6 quotes“You can fix anything but a blank page.”