Harold Bloom

(17 votes)   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.

Harold Bloom
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(296 votes)   I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike -- and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two -- are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.

Harold Bloom
British Professor, Author

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(87 votes)   I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike-and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two-are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.

Harold Bloom

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(83 votes)   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.

Harold Bloom
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(28 votes)   What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

Harold Bloom
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(23 votes)   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.

Harold Bloom
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(22 votes)   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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(22 votes)   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.

Harold Bloom
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(21 votes)   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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(21 votes)   Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

Harold Bloom
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(20 votes)   I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

Harold Bloom
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(19 votes)   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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(19 votes)   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.

Harold Bloom
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(18 votes)   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.

Harold Bloom
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(15 votes)   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.

Harold Bloom
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