Famous quotes by Critics

"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"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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, Critic

"I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States"

Harold Bloom, Critic

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

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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, Critic

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

Harold Bloom, Critic

"I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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, Critic

"Shakespeare is universal"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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, Critic

"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, Critic

"People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without"

Walter Pater, Critic

"To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. This spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy, and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us"

Walter Pater, Critic

"At first sight, experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action"

Walter Pater, Critic

"A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world"

Robert Hughes, Critic

"One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs"

Robert Hughes, Critic

"You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane"

Roger Ebert, Critic

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