Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? — 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
“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
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
“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