Harold Bloom > Quotes

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
― Harold Bloom

“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. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.”
― Harold Bloom

“Real reading is a lonely activity.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“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 sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”
― Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

“Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.”
― 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.”
― Harold Bloom

“We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.”
― 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.”
― Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

“It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.”
― Harold Bloom

“We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.”
― Harold Bloom

“...the representation of human character and personality remains always the supreme literary value, whether in drama, lyric or narrative. I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.”
― Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“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 of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.”
― Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life

“I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.”
― 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. ”
― Harold Bloom

“Rereading old books is the highest form of literary pleasure and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness.”
― Harold Bloom

“Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)”
― Harold Bloom

“Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“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.”
― Harold Bloom

“I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.”
― Harold Bloom

“People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.”
― Harold Bloom

“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.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers. ”
― Harold Bloom

“Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.”
― Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

“Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others.”
― Harold Bloom

“Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Originality must compound with inheritance.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.”
― Harold Bloom

“All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages