Harold Bloom quotes

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you. (Harold Bloom)
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. View quote
Harold Bloom
The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. View quote
Harold Bloom
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage. View quote
Harold Bloom
Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates. View quote
Harold Bloom
Shakespeare is universal. View quote
Harold Bloom
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 consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude. View quote
Harold Bloom
We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own. View quote
Harold Bloom
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable. View quote
Harold Bloom
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads. View quote
Harold Bloom
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change. (Harold Bloom)
I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. View quote
Harold Bloom
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering. View quote
Harold Bloom
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. View quote
Harold Bloom
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 it does not exist. View quote
Harold Bloom
Real reading is a lonely activity. View quote
Harold Bloom
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin. View quote
Harold Bloom
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 it into supposedly analytical vocabulary. View quote
Harold Bloom
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 say. View quote
Harold Bloom
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. View quote
Harold Bloom
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. (Harold Bloom)
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 sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology. View quote
Harold Bloom
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. View quote
Harold Bloom
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough. View quote
Harold Bloom
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron. View quote
Harold Bloom