"Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."

Literature, Shakespeare

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"Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."

Exlpore more Literature quotes

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

Neil Gaiman, British Author

Literature, Fiction, Empathy, Imagination, Emotion

"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."

Roman Payne, American Novelist

Literature, Travel, Love, Myth

"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around? "Darling, what do you mean? "There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay." How? By being stupid?"

Ayn Rand, Russian Writer

Literature, Audience, Judgment, Opinion

"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Literature, Prose, Novel, Expectation

"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."

Criss Jami, American Philosopher

Literature, Fiction, Truth, Life

"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."

Alain de Botton, English Writer

Literature, Books, Recognition, Self, Clarity

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."

Gustave Flaubert, French Novelist

Literature, Imagination, Story, Heart, Journey

"The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape."

George Santayana, American Philosopher

Literature, Miser

"I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren't easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all."

Alice Hoffman, American Author

Literature, Storytelling, Truth, Emotion, Experience

"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."

H. L. Mencken, American Writer

Literature, Character, Decay, Fiction, Truth

Explore more quotes by Harold Bloom

"Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin."

Sympathy, Criticism

"The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent."

World,

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

Reading, Read

"In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary."

Fact, Mind, Psychology, Shakespeare

"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."

Art, Death

"What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude."

Strength, Poems

"What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era."

People, Beginning, End, First

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

Literature, End, Suffering

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

Future, Literary, States, United

"If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people."

Work, People, Negative, Anxiety