Quotes from Harold Bloom

But I can't understand a Yahweh , or a God , who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia .

Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.

No , no I'm not an atheist . it's no fun being an atheist .

If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.

He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.

The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.

At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

Jesus is present only as a supreme representation of suffering and change, one that Shakespeare (in his dangerous era) shrewdly and invariably avoided.

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.