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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.

Harold Bloom

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Harold Bloom
Age: 89 †
Born: 1930
Born: July 11
Died: 2019
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Professor
Writer
New York City
New York
Harold Irving Bloom
Without
Entered
Phases
Sympathy
Admit
University
Stalinism
Totally
Stalin
Criticism
Universities
Goes
Phase

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
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I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
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What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
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We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
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You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.
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All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
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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.
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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There is no method except yourself.
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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.
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The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
Harold Bloom