Daily Inspiration Quote by M. H. Abrams

A little name-dropping can be a parlor trick; here it becomes a quiet flex disguised as genial small talk. M. H. Abrams tosses off John Updike, Tom Pynchon, and Harold Bloom the way someone might mention restaurants they like, and that’s exactly the point: he’s normalizing proximity to literary celebrity. “Updike is always fun” lands first because it’s disarmingly casual, almost anti-judgmental. Abrams, the great Romanticist and institutional builder, isn’t performing the critic as high priest; he’s performing taste as sociability. The adjective “fun” punctures the aura around Updike’s prestige and, by extension, around Abrams’s own.

Then comes the sly escalation: “one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.” The repetition is deadpan, nearly throwaway, but the subtext is a résumé. Pynchon is not just any student; he’s the famously elusive novelist, a man whose scarcity is part of his myth. Abrams claims him with a lightly possessive phrase that still respects the mystique: no anecdotes, no insider details, just the credential of having taught him. Bloom, the critic-as-celebrity, completes the triangulation: Abrams sits at a generational crossroads where creative writing, postwar maximalism, and critical canon-making all pass through the same seminar room.

The specific intent reads like modesty-by-omission. Abrams doesn’t boast about his own work; he lets the cultural capital of his students and peers do it for him. It’s an old academic move, executed with enough warmth that it feels like conversation rather than conquest.