Harold Bloom - Literary Quotes

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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.

Harold Bloom

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

Harold Bloom

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

Harold Bloom

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.

Harold Bloom