Quotes from 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.

Reading well is one of the great 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…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

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

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

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

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

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

the representation of human character and personality remains always the supreme literary value, whether in drama, lyric or narrative. I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

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

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.

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

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.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

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

As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.