Harold Bloom Quotes

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

People always want reasons for things ... but sometimes there are no reasons.

It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods.

In an infinite Universe anything can happen.

There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.

You never know what's going to happen. Anything can happen there... and often does.

Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

This is a quantum universe ... neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.

All thoughts emit a throw of dice

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?

You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance, we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned.

If you do a character, always make the character with a big question mark. Even if the character is very enigmatic and all over the place, make him always with a question mark, because if you turn a question mark upside down, like they do in South America in Spanish, then it becomes a hook.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.

Ezra clapped his hands. "all right," he said. "In addition to the books we're reading as a class, I want to do an extra side project on unreliable narrators." Devon Arliss raised her hand. "what does that mean?" Ezra strode around the room. "well, the narrator tells us the story in the book, right? But what if... the narrator isn't telling us the truth? Maybe he's telling us his skewed version of the story to get you on his side. Or to scare you. Or maybe he's crazy!