Harold Bloom Quotes

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.

When I was teaching English and trying to get kids passionate about reading, the most effective weapon I had was 'The Martian Chronicles.'

I hope to instill, in every child I meet, my love and enthusiasm for reading and stories.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.