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.”

“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.”

“You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.”

“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.”

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

“The inventor knows HOW to borrow.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“One reads for oneself and for strangers.”

“Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.”

“Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.”