What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

— Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom Quotes

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

— Harold Bloom

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

— Harold Bloom

Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.

— Harold Bloom

For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.

— Harold Bloom

No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation.

— Harold Bloom

Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.

— Harold Bloom

Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.

— Harold Bloom

All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, “condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.

— Harold Bloom

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

But I can’t understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia .

— Harold Bloom

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

— Harold Bloom

But Hamlet is death’s ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.

— Harold Bloom

Without the Canon, we cease to think.

— Harold Bloom

If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.

— Harold Bloom

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!

— Harold Bloom
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