Famous quotes by Harold Bloom:
"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."
"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."
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
"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. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked."
"He is a great artist. He may be the finest artist among American writers since William Faulkner and Henry James. There's the endless variety of modes he works in. His style, his stance, his point of view."
"How To Read and Why."
"I think that's not reading because there's nothing there to be read,"
"the best living poet."
"It's hard to think of a rival,"
"I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time."
"The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic."
"If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people."
"If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit."
"No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem."
"I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron."
"I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene."
"What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude."
"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."
"What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era."
