Harold Bloom Quotes

Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

Frank Baum knew at once he had written something special when he completed 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.'

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.

Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.

It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.

The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.

I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

Mother Dolores Hart's prose is a reflection of the inner beauty she has always possessed. A fascinating read... and read again!

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.