“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
“Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes” — 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
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. — 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
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all, — 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
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
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
A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. .… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear,… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“...the representation of human character and personality remains always the supreme literary value, whether in drama, lyric or narrative. I am naive… — 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
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
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
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
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
“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
