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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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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
Think
Awful
Thinking
Ridiculous
Infinite
Discernible
Talent
Wallace
Write
Jest
Seems
Masterpiece
Many
Regarded
Writing
Offensive

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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.
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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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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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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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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.
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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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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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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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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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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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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Shakespeare is universal.
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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.
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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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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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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.
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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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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