226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

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.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

He is a great artist. He may be the finest artist among American writers since William Faulkner and Henry James. There's the endless variety of modes he works in. His style, his stance, his point of view.

I think that's not reading because there's nothing there to be read,