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 unwariness.

— Harold Bloom

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 favor of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

— Harold Bloom

All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

— Harold Bloom

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.

— Harold Bloom

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

— Harold Bloom

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

— Harold Bloom