226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

Originality must compound with inheritance.

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.