Quotes by Harold Bloom

About Harold Bloom:

Harold Bloom is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

Harold Bloom

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

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.

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

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.

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.

Harold Bloom

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

Harold Bloom

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

Harold Bloom

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

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.

Harold Bloom

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 Commo...

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

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

Harold Bloom

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

Harold Bloom

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

Harold Bloom

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

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

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 catastrop...

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 the...

Harold Bloom

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.

Harold Bloom

Author Bio

  • NameHarold Bloom
  • DescriptionAmerican literary critic and scholar
  • BornJuly 11, 1930
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionLiterary Historian; Writer; Professor
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program