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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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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
Poet
Rival
Literature
Rivals
Doe
Critic
Believe
Genre
Never
Believed
Critics
Criticism
Exist

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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There is no method except yourself.
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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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.
Harold Bloom
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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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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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Shakespeare is universal.
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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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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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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We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
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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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 would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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