Harold Bloom Quotes

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

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In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

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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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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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The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

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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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Shakespeare is universal.

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The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

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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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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

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But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

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The world does not get to be a better or a worse place it just gets more senescent.

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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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If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people.

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No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

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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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If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

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What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

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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.

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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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I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time.

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The real 'Hamlet' is of course later, first performed in 1600, then performed with revisions in 1601, and eventually included in the First Folio after Shakespeare's death, ... It really has more in common with the two major works it comes between, the two great comedies 'As You Like It' and 'Twelfth Night'.

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He is a great artist. He may be the finest artist among American writers since William Faulkner and Henry James. There's the endless variety of modes he works in. His style, his stance, his point of view.

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We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough that we need to know ourselves better that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

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