Harold Bloom Quotes

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us. ~ Harold Bloom

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. ~ Harold Bloom

Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer.
We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself. ~ Harold Bloom

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves. ~ Harold Bloom

Literature is achieved anxiety. ~ Harold Bloom

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge. ~ Harold Bloom

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. ~ Harold Bloom

But I can't understand a Yahweh , or a God , who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia . ~ Harold Bloom

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful. ~ Harold Bloom

Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence. ~ Harold Bloom

Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism ~ Harold Bloom

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters. ~ 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

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy. ~ Harold Bloom

Beckett . . . Joyce . . . Proust . . . Shakespeare ~ Harold Bloom

If Hamlet indeed thought not too much but too wisely, then Borges' Homer (who is also
Shakespeare) has thought not too well, but too endlessly. Partly Borges is satirizing Back to Methuselah, but he is also savaging
his own literary idealism. Without rivalry and polemic between the Immortals there is, paradoxically, no life, and literature dies .

For Borges, all theology is a division of fantastic literature. In "The Immortal" he observes with superb irony that despite their
professed belief in immortality, Jews, Christians, and Moslems venerate only this world because they truly believe only in it and bind future states to it only as rewards or punishments. ~ Harold Bloom

I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art. ~ Harold Bloom

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes ~ Harold Bloom

Forgetfulness is a property of all action. The man of action is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognizes one law - the law of that which is to be. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other. ~ Andrew O'Hagan

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa ... Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both. ~ Harold Bloom

For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny. Readers in our flooded landscape use their own perceptiveness. But an advance can be of some help. If you believe that the canon in time will select itself, you still can follow a critical impulse to hasten the process, as I did with the later Stevens, Ashbury, and, more recently, Henri Cole. ~ Harold Bloom

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value. ~ Harold Bloom

We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist. ~ Harold Bloom

seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall. ~ 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

You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love. ~ Harold Bloom

Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance. ~ Harold Bloom

Infinite Jest' is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. ~ 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

Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious. ~ Harold Bloom

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself. ~ Harold Bloom

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality ~ Harold Bloom

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden. ~ Harold Bloom

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

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

[José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile - he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive. ~ Harold Bloom

I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho's grand admonition: "Whatever it is, I'm against it! ~ Harold Bloom

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider. ~ Harold Bloom

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well. ~ Harold Bloom

BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
INTERVIEWER: It's always interminable?
BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers. ~ Harold Bloom

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene. ~ Harold Bloom

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.
INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits?
BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited. ~ Harold Bloom

[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well. ~ Harold Bloom

My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions. ~ Harold Bloom

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life. ~ Harold Bloom

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy. ~ Harold Bloom

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments. ~ Harold Bloom

Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired. ~ Harold Bloom

He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. ~ Harold Bloom

The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. ~ Harold Bloom

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life. ~ Harold Bloom

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable. ~ Harold Bloom

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation. ~ Harold Bloom

There is no method except yourself. ~ Harold Bloom

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 all this moralizing will subside. ~ Harold Bloom

One doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent. ~ Harold Bloom

Whether one believes that the faith he spawned is the world's only true religion or a preposterous fable, Joseph emerges from the fog of time as one of the most remarkable figures ever to have breathed American air. "Whatever his lapses," Harold Bloom argues in The American Religion, "Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history ... In proportion to his importance and his complexity, he remains the least-studied personage, of an undiminished vitality, in our entire national sage. ~ Jon Krakauer

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks. ~ Harold Bloom

The inventor knows HOW to borrow. ~ Harold Bloom

No , no I'm not an atheist . it's no fun being an atheist . ~ Harold Bloom

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it. ~ Harold Bloom

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing. ~ Harold Bloom

Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading ... the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education. ~ Harold Bloom

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

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves ... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes. ~ Harold Bloom

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work. ~ 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. ~ Harold Bloom

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks. ~ Harold Bloom

He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent. ~ Harold Bloom

One reads for oneself and for strangers. ~ Harold Bloom

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality. ~ Harold Bloom

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student. ~ M.H. Abrams

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails. ~ Harold Bloom

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also. ~ Harold Bloom

One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength. ~ Harold Bloom

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American. ~ Harold Bloom

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

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively. ~ 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 idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me. ~ Harold Bloom

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory. ~ Harold Bloom

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons. ~ Harold Bloom

Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet. ~ Harold Bloom

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self. ~ Harold Bloom

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity ~ Harold Bloom

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

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers. ~ Harold Bloom

Every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do. ~ Harold Bloom

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands. ~ Harold Bloom

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron. ~ Harold Bloom

Real reading is a lonely activity. ~ 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. ~ Harold Bloom

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality. W ~ Harold Bloom

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

Shakespeare is universal. ~ Harold Bloom

We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it? ~ Harold Bloom

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude. ~ Harold Bloom

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

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. ~ Harold Bloom