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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."
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"The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot."

"At first, they'll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start sounding the more they'll dislike you."

"There is a difference between criticizing people and criticizing a people's uninformed ideals. That is, unless one defines himself or others by their ideals, then he is offended, and usually offended secretly. Because oddly enough, this person is the same person quickest to resort to dismissive name-calling, such as 'bigot' or 'zealot'. And oddly enough, he is always the one, the 'open-minded' one, who adamantly protests for, not only himself, but others not to listen to any type of scholarly theological truth inherently for the sake of his own personal, moral beliefs."

"People have the right to criticize you. You do not have the right to criticize anyone."

"The voice of the inner critic is mean, unforgiving, punishing, and downright hurtful. When you allow it to run roughshod over your happiness and emotional well-being, it can wreak havoc on your peace of mind and leave you feeling anxious, fearful, and depleted."

"Learn to brush off criticism as easily as you brush aside hollow compliments."

"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick."

"Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?"
Explore more quotes by Harold Bloom

"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."

"I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene."

"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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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