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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

More quotes by 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.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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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 would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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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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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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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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What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
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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.
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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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There is no method except yourself.
Harold Bloom
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Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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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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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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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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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom