Harold Bloom
Influential critic whose works on Shakespeare provided quotable literary insights, though primarily a scholar.
Quotes by Harold Bloom
Shakespeare is the inventor of the human as we know it.
The aesthetic is the only realm in which we can still experience a kind of freedom.
Reading well is a difficult and solitary art.
Influence is a form of anxiety.
The true use of Shakespeare is to increase one's own consciousness.
Literary criticism is not a science, but an art.
The self is a text, and we are always revising it.
Poetry is the only mode of thought that can resist time.
The function of criticism is to save the poem, not the poet.
The greatest writers are those who are most original, and originality is a form of belatedness.
The true critic is a strong misreader.
The authentic self is a fiction, but a necessary one.
The purpose of reading is to enlarge the self.
Literary value is not a social construct; it is an aesthetic one.
The best way to read a poem is to read it aloud.
The imagination is the only faculty that can truly create.
The critic's task is to illuminate the text, not to replace it.
The self is a battlefield of contending voices.
The true reader is a solitary reader.
The aesthetic experience is a form of transcendence.