Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is an UN-Shakespearian burden.

— Harold Bloom

Consciousness is the material poetic that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

— Harold Bloom

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

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

— Harold Bloom

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnamed even the blanks.

— Harold Bloom

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

— Harold Bloom