Shakespeare is universal. — Harold Bloom

Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves. — Harold Bloom

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say. — Harold Bloom

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage. — Harold Bloom

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order. — Harold Bloom

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary. — Harold Bloom

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light. — Harold Bloom

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy. — Harold Bloom

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. — Harold Bloom

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

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

Real reading is a lonely activity. — Harold Bloom

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

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

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

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. — Harold Bloom

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike–and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two–are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. — Harold Bloom

I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene. — Harold Bloom

We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. — Harold Bloom

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own. — Harold Bloom

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. — Harold Bloom

The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier. — Harold Bloom

He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent. — Harold Bloom

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. — Harold Bloom

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. — Harold Bloom

There is no method except yourself. — Harold Bloom

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

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes. — Harold Bloom

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both. — Harold Bloom