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Quotes by Harold Bloom

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
– Harold Bloom
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
– 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.
– 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
We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
– Harold Bloom
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
– Harold Bloom
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.
– Harold Bloom
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.
– Harold Bloom
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
– Harold Bloom
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.
– Harold Bloom
But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.
– Harold Bloom