Harold Bloom Quotes

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.

~ Harold Bloom

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.

~ Harold Bloom

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

~ Harold Bloom

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

~ Harold Bloom

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

~ Harold Bloom

You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

~ Harold Bloom

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

~ Harold Bloom

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

~ Harold Bloom

Originality must compound with inheritance.

~ Harold Bloom

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

~ Harold Bloom

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

~ Harold Bloom

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

~ Harold Bloom

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

~ Harold Bloom

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

~ Harold Bloom

How to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

~ Harold Bloom

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

~ Harold Bloom

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

~ Harold Bloom

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

~ Harold Bloom

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

~ Harold Bloom

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.

~ Harold Bloom

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

~ Harold Bloom

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

~ Harold Bloom

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

~ Harold Bloom

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

~ Harold Bloom

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

~ Harold Bloom

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

~ Harold Bloom

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

~ Harold Bloom

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

~ Harold Bloom

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.

~ Harold Bloom

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

~ Harold Bloom

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

~ Harold Bloom

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

~ Harold Bloom

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

~ Harold Bloom

Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

~ Harold Bloom

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

~ Harold Bloom

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

~ Harold Bloom

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.

~ Harold Bloom

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

~ Harold Bloom

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

~ Harold Bloom

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

~ Harold Bloom