“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… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
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
“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 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
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 Copy Share Image
“Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes” — 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
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you. — 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
“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
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
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
