226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious.

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.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike.

You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.

What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther’s outburst “Death to the Law!” which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became “Death to the Jews!” The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple.

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!

Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden.

Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.