Quote

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Harold Bloom

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Greek
Entire
Influence
Successful
Misreading
History
Prior
Great
Text
Think
Testament
Thinking
Strongest

More quotes by Harold Bloom

Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
Image
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
Harold Bloom
Image
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
Image
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom
Image
I won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our ways of thinking and feeling-about ourselves, those we love, those we hate, those we realize are hopelessly 'other' to us-are more shaped by Shakespeare than they are by the experience of our own lives.
Harold Bloom
Image
Literature is achieved anxiety.
Harold Bloom
Image
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
Harold Bloom
Image
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Harold Bloom
Image
... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.
Harold Bloom
Image
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.
Harold Bloom
Image
Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom
Image
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
Harold Bloom
Image
There is no method except yourself.
Harold Bloom
Image
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
Image
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Harold Bloom
Image
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold Bloom
Image
Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
Image
Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.
Harold Bloom