I remark in this new book that I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom. And those are not the standards now applied in the universities and colleges of the English-speaking world. Nor are they the standards applied in the media. Everyone is now much more concerned with gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, skin pigmentation, and twenty other irrelevancies, whereas I am talking about what I have never talked about before, and that is wisdom.


"Anything that we are able to speak, to say or formulate, is something which is already dead in our hearts" – we can't even feel it anymore, you know. [Nietzsche] says there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking – that sounds like Hamlet himself, don't you think? I think it relates to the same phenomenon... You can't really catch the living moment of what is happening to you as you read Shakespeare or as you read Tolstoy, or Dante, or Cervantes, or Dostoevsky – any of the greatest writers.

-literary critic Harold Bloom