Harold Bloom Quotes

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

The drawing and the crafting of the story are fun, but it's the overall meaning that matters to me. It might escape some people who just want to read a comic, and that's fine. The overall meaning is what matters.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

When you go to a movie, it's about what's not being said. I tried to bring that to Greg Sumner. It was always about what's not being said.

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.