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There is no method except yourself.

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
Method
Except
Crafts

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Harold Bloom
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
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Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold Bloom
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I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
Harold Bloom
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Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom
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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
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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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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.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.
Harold Bloom
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Harold Bloom
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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
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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.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom