Harold Bloom Quotes

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

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

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.

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

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

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

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.

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

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

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

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.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.