Harold Bloom

Literature is achieved anxiety.

— Harold Bloom

Shakespeare is universal.

— Harold Bloom

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

— Harold Bloom

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

— Harold Bloom

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

— Harold Bloom

There is no method except yourself.

— Harold Bloom

Real reading is a lonely activity.

— Harold Bloom

“[...] imaginative literature situates itself somewhere between truth and meaning [...]”

— 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

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

— Harold Bloom

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

— Harold Bloom

To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all,

— Harold Bloom

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

— Harold Bloom

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I…

— Harold Bloom

“Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is…

— Harold Bloom

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems…

— Harold Bloom

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human…

— Harold Bloom

“He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.”

— Harold Bloom

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

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history…

— Harold Bloom

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry…

— Harold Bloom

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's…

— Harold Bloom

“The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training…

— Harold Bloom

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic…

— Harold Bloom

“There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think that they are Christians truly are something…

— Harold Bloom

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in…

— Harold Bloom

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

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to…

— Harold Bloom

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the…

— Harold Bloom

“Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It…

— Harold Bloom

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors…

— Harold Bloom

“For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other…

— Harold Bloom

“Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the…

— Harold Bloom

...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the…

— Harold Bloom

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless,…

— Harold Bloom

“I treasure ruefully some memories of W.H. Auden that go back to the middle 1960s, when he arrived in New Haven to…

— Harold Bloom

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

— Harold Bloom