“[...] imaginative literature situates itself somewhere between truth and meaning [...]” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all, — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that,… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end.… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. — Harold Bloom Copy Share
“Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier. — Harold Bloom Copy Share
Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
“We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. — Harold Bloom Copy Share
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me. — Harold Bloom Copy Share
If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself… — Harold Bloom Copy Share
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