Quotes by Harold Bloom

“(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. ”

“Originality must compound with inheritance.”

“The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.”

“Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.”

“The inventor knows HOW to borrow.”

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

“All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.”

“Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its str...”

“We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.”

“Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.”

“Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.”

“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 ...”

“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)...”

“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'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 ...”

“Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.”

“One reads for oneself and for strangers.”

“Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.”