Jeanette Winterson, Reading provides roots for a writer

I’m an old-fashioned girl. That is, I’m on the side of Harold Bloom. Everybody should read the Canon of Western Literature, even if you don’t accept it as canonical. For a reader, it’s riches. For a writer, it’s roots. A lot of modern work is rootless and shallow because the writer has no literary resources – nothing to draw on, in a way that is often unconscious. It doesn’t matter how you’ve been educated, if you can read you can educate yourself. Ignorance has no advantages.