We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
Harold BloomRead
We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of literature in shaping cultural and religious beliefs.
Harold Bloom argues that much of our culture is shaped by literary traditions, especially in the context of religion. He highlights how literary figures, such as the divine characters of Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah, are often revered by their followers, demonstrating the deep connection between literature and cultural identity, despite claims of literature's decline in modern society.
Themes
LiteratureCultureBeliefReligionIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a lecture on the importance of literature in culture.
More from Harold Bloom
All quotes →I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold BloomRead
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold BloomRead
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Harold BloomRead
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.
Harold BloomRead
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 BloomRead
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It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there's this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.
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What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
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Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.
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Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
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It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.
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