Harold Bloom

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

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

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

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character _ WH Auden

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.