“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
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
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
“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
We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have… — 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
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
“We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.” — 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
“[...] imaginative literature situates itself somewhere between truth and meaning [...]” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” — 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
“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
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 Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“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 Image
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
