Harold Bloom Quotes

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

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. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading"ﾂｦis the search for a difficult pleasure.

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

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

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.

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) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.