Quotes by : Harold Bloom

Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience,....

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

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet.....

Originality must compound with inheritance.

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right....

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary....

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly....

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not....

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