Harold Bloom

“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.”

“At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.”

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

“No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.”

“No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.”

“Leggiamo per porre rimedio alla nostra solitudine, anche se poi, di fatto, la nostra solitudine cresce parallelamente all'aumentare e all'approfondirsi delle nostre letture. Non riuscirei proprio a considerare il leggere come un vizio, ma va concesso che non si tratta neppure di una virtù.”

“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.”

“Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.”

“Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yield to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow.”

“...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.”

“We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.”

“For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny. Readers in our flooded landscape use their own perceptiveness. But an advance can be of some help. If you believe that the canon in time will select itself, you still can follow a critical impulse to hasten the process, as I did with the later Stevens, Ashbury, and, more recently, Henri Cole.”

“Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)”

“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.”

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

“(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.”

“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.”

“We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.”

“[José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.”

“We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?”

“Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.”

“Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.”

“The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.”

“Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering. ”

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”

“Real reading is a lonely activity.”