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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Harold Bloom

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Harold Bloom
Age: 89 †
Born: 1930
Born: July 11
Died: 2019
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Professor
Writer
New York City
New York
Harold Irving Bloom
Wells
Well
Pleasures
Afford
Solitude
Greatest
Pleasure
Reading

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
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Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
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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.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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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.
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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.
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The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.
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We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.
Harold Bloom
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom