{"author":"Harold Bloom","author_id":"Harold+Bloom","total_quotes":70,"quotes":[{"text":"Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["discipleship","frustrations","obstacles","pessimism"],"id":11381,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["communication","distinctiveness","openness","style"],"id":17199,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["criticism","literary-criticism","poetry"],"id":17274,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["conformity","culture","influence","reading"],"id":44450,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["introspection","reading","thought-life"],"id":47838,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["autonomy","individuality"],"id":51149,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["conformity","independence","perspective"],"id":53635,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["shakespeare"],"id":63323,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"Originality must compound with inheritance.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["change","grace-of-god","heritage","identity","innovation","legacy","parenthood"],"id":67012,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["calling","discipleship","idolatry","vocation","work","worship"],"id":67076,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":70,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}