A biography for Harold Bloomhasn’t been written yet.
“Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.”
“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.”
“A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality”
“Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
“Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.”
“In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.”
“Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.”
“Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes”
“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.”
“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.”
“Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.”
“I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.”
“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.”
“The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.”