Harold Bloom

“Shakespeare is the Canon. He sets the standard and the limits of literature.”

“All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.”

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”

“A poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet.”

“To read the best that has been written is the principal means to teaching the mind to think for itself.”

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.”

“Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.”

“Freud is the mythologist of our secular culture, and the only one we have.”

“Irony is the trope of our time, and it is a dangerous one.”

“The great enemy of aesthetic pleasure is to have been told what to think.”

“Information is endlessly available to us; where is wisdom?”

“The anxiety of influence is a poetic misprision, a creative misreading.”

“Aesthetic value is a real phenomenon, and it is not reducible to social or political or moral considerations.”

“We read not only for pleasure and for knowledge, but also to find our own selves, and to find the selves of others.”

“The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn to die.”

“Genius is not a matter of cultural production, but of cognitive acuity, vital force, and creative originality.”

“The reader is the hero of the story of reading.”

“We live in the shade of a lapsed idealism.”