Quotes from Harold Bloom

Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.

The tragic sense of life in Don Quixote is also the faith of Moby Dick. Ahab is a monomaniac; so is the kindlier Quixote, but both are tormented idealists who seek justice in human terms, not as theocentric men but as ungodly, godlike men.

Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy.

The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.

seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

Every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.

If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, "The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.

For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.

I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature.

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it. INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits? BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.

thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.

All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation.

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes