"Harold Bloom" is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Bloom came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the Literary canon#Debate/Canon wars of the early 1990s.

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

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

The best living poet.

How To Read and Why.

It's hard to think of a rival.

I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time.

I think that's not reading because there's nothing there to be read.

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. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.

He is a great artist. He may be the finest artist among American writers since William Faulkner and Henry James. There's the endless variety of modes he works in. His style, his stance, his point of view.

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.