I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike – Harold Bloom
People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I – Harold Bloom
Criticism in the universities, Ill have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. Its Stalinism without Stalin. – Harold Bloom
But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean Im 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. – Harold Bloom
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic. – Harold Bloom
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. – Harold Bloom
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. – Harold Bloom
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. – Harold Bloom
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. – Harold Bloom
