The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

— Harold Bloom

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

— Harold Bloom

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

— Harold Bloom

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

— Harold Bloom

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also.

— Harold Bloom

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.

— Harold Bloom

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

— Harold Bloom

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.

— Harold Bloom