Harold Bloom Quotes

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.