Harold Bloom

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

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.