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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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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
Would
Studies
Literary
Study
Future
United
States

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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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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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.
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Shakespeare is universal.
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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.
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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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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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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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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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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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The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
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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.
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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
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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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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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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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