Harold Bloom Quotes about Reading

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

Harold Bloom

Reading, Writing, People

"Falstaff for our times". www.theguardian.com. March 5, 1999.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

Harold Bloom

Reading, Knowledge, Self

Harold Bloom (2001). “How to Read and Why”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Harold Bloom

Reading, Solitude, Pleasure

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

Harold Bloom

Kings, Reading, Sadness

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

Harold Bloom

Children, Book, Reading

Harold Bloom (2001). “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

Real reading is a lonely activity.

Harold Bloom

Lonely, Real, Reading

Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.534, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

Harold Bloom

Art, Reading, Sublime

Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

Harold Bloom

Art, Reading, Passion

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

Harold Bloom

Wise, Book, Reading

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Harold Bloom

Falling In Love, Real, Reading

"Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1". Interview with Antonio Weiss in The Paris Review, Issue 118, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1991.