Reading quotes

From an interview with Harold Bloom:

I sometimes tell myself hopefully that deep reading is such an addiction, and as you said it’s visceral, that it really just sort of comes to you—that there will always be the solitary readers. Isn’t reading a kind of natural hunger? I mean, it can’t just have been an eccentricity on my part. What we really need [is] to reach out for what we can get, because we are shy with one another, and we are shy with ourselves. We read so many books because we cannot know enough people.
...
There is more authentic literacy now outside the universities than inside universities. And that’s awful, because that means that our learning tradition in the universities will die. Not because the students want it that way, but simply because there has been a treason of the clerks, an ideological and schematic crusade to [break] down the barriers between the so-called popular culture and what once would have been considered high culture. It’s not as though they were really talking about popular culture—they’re not talking about folkways, or folklore, they’re talking about commercial garbage, manufactured for a consumer society.

From http://www.yale.edu/yfp/archives/99_9_bloom.html