All Harold Bloom Quotes
- What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering. Color
- All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is. All
- There is no method except yourself. Crafts
- Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the… According
- Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out… Achieved
- Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order. Disorder
- We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily… Actually Worship
- I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence. Entire
- At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy. All
- Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads. Accept
- But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to… All
- Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you… Adolescence
- I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene. Believe
- I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might… Contamination
- I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron. Inspirational
- I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. Future
- I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or… Believe
- In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating… Analytical
- Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? Available
- More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men. Baptists
- What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a… Beginning
- What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical… Awareness
- We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space,… All
- Literature is achieved anxiety. Achieved
- Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually… Academic