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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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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
Thinking
Contamination
Freud
Shakespeare
Learned
Might
Nothing
Something
Think

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
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One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.
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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... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.
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
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Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
Harold Bloom
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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.
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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We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
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Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
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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I won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our ways of thinking and feeling-about ourselves, those we love, those we hate, those we realize are hopelessly 'other' to us-are more shaped by Shakespeare than they are by the experience of our own lives.
Harold Bloom
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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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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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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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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.
Harold Bloom
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom