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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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"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."
"A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it."
"If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it."
"Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own."
"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."
"You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else."
"By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle."
Explore more quotes by Harold Bloom
"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."
"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."
"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."
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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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