Harold Bloom Quotes

Best Quotes by Harold Bloom (Top 10)

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
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.
Harold Bloom
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.
Harold Bloom
It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.
Harold Bloom
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Harold Bloom
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
Harold Bloom
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.
Harold Bloom
The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.
Harold Bloom

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.
Harold Bloom
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Harold Bloom
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
Harold Bloom
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom