Quotes from Harold Bloom

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

I again recall provoking resentment by dubbing the American bard "a male lesbian," much as Shakespeare was when writing the sonnets.

Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment's alternatives to the Canon, I reflect that these aspirants must believe they have spoken prose all their lives, or else that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.

Nossos atuais neo-historicistas, com sua curiosa mistura de Foucault e Marx, são apenas um episódio bem menor na interminável história do platonismo. Platão esperava, banindo o poeta, banir também o tirano. Banir Shakespeare, ou antes reduzi-lo a seus contextos, não vai livrar-nos de nossos tiranos.

Não posso ter certeza, mas às vezes imagino se uma preferência crítica pelo contexto sobre o texto não reflete uma geração tornada impaciente com a leitura em profundidade.

that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics

Without the Canon, we cease to think.

The central image for freedom in Lucretius is the clinamen or sudden "swerve." As the atoms in the cosmos fall downward and outward they capriciously swerve, and this change in direction provides for our freedom of will. Last poems, as I read them, execute clinamens in regard to a previous poetic career. They assert a final freedom for the imagination

Emerson, a shrewder prophet [than Freud], could have told Freud that psychoanalysis was another form of the triumph of literary culture over science, as well as over religion and philosophy.

I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho's grand admonition: Whatever it is, I'm against it!

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who admired the novel with absolute conviction, famously remarked to Boswell, "Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story…you would hang yourself….You must read him for the sentiment.

The vision men call Lilith is formed primarily by their anxiety at what they perceive to be the beauty of a woman's body, a beauty they believe to be at once, far greater and far less than their own.

The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools.

Great styles are sufficient for canonicity because they possess the power of contamination, and contamination is the pragmatic test for canon formation.

Everyone has, or should have, a desert island list against that day when, fleeing one's enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one's time quietly reading. If

follow Nietzsche, who warned us that what we can find words for is already dead in our hearts, so that there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Everyone has, or should have, a desert island list against that day when, fleeing one's enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one's time quietly reading.

Yet as readers, writers, and teachers, our authentic context is the myriad countrymen and -women who live in a daily reality that is mostly not at all our own. Socioeconomic reductions of their stance help only in a limited way. Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.

Uno de los dones más peculiares y originales de Kafka es que sus relatos parecen haber regresado de nuestro olvido, dejándonos siempre con la sensación de que perseveramos para olvidar lo que sentimos cuando experimentamos esas extrañezas.

the great artist of the intransitive verb also avoided objects of his sexual drive; what evidence we have indicates that he carnally embraced himself only, and walked the open road with only the thought of death and the knowledge of death as his close companions

Is becoming wise an act of knowledge? For Nietzsche, the greatest thoughts were the greatest actions. Thinking in and through metaphors, Shakespeare gives us persons who act with titanic self-destructiveness, incarnate sublimity:

A poet who equates his soul with the fourfold metaphor of night, death, the mother, and the sea is thinking figuratively as fiercely as did the Hermeticists and the Kabbalists.