Top 66 Michael Dirda Quotes

Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I’m just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style.

Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself – of poems and stories and essays – delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.

A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know.

The goal of a just society should be to provide satisfying work with a living wage to all its citizens.

No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I’m seldom drawn to a book unless it’s by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me.

Adventurous reading allows one to escape a little from the provincialities of one’s home culture and the blinders of one’s narrow self.

Writers keep writing and publishers publishing – it never grows boring.

‘The Admirable Crichton’ is probably Barrie’s most famous work after ‘Peter Pan’, nearly a pendant to that classic.

I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood.

In my own case, my folks didn’t actually object to comics, as many parents did, but they pretty much felt the things were a waste of time.

People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I’m addicted, that I’m no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers.

Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents’ Code.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author’s company.

For years, I meant to read ‘Arabian Sands’, Wilfred Thesiger’s account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia’s Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing.

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

I didn’t work for any newspapers in college, never worked for any newspaper before ‘The Washington Post’.

Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I’m reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.

Any man’s death diminishes us, but when an artist passes away, we lose not just an island but an entire archipelago.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

Books don’t only furnish a room: they also make the best holiday gifts.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, J. M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ – starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard – was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchard’s gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook.

While Napoleon believed his fortunes to be governed by destiny, his real genius lay in self-control and martial daring coupled with an indomitable will to power.

To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all – French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal.

I’m an appreciator. I love all kinds of books, and I want others to love them, too.

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we’d like, but we can still make a stab at it.

Halloween isn’t the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter’s tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.

In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two children, barely supporting his family as the agent for a pencil-sharpener business.

Basically, I think that most people either make too much money or not enough money. The jobs that are essential and important pay too little, and those that are essentially managerial pay far too much.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that M. Dirda is a sucker for anything bookish in the way of artwork.

In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.

Critics for established venues are vetted by editors; they usually demonstrate a certain objectivity; and they come with known backgrounds and specialized knowledge.

My wife tells me I should check out ‘Downton Abbey’, but I gather that series might be almost too intense for my temperate nature.

I don’t think of myself as a critic at all. I’m a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history.

Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing.

Summertime, and the reading is easy… Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.

Many people know that Shakespeare’s dramatic ‘canon’ was established in 1623 by the publication of the so-called First Folio. That hefty volume contained thirty-six plays.

On any given day, I’m likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences – or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.

For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past.

Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn’t tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur over this, that, and the other.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

Once upon a time, I sat in my mother’s lap as she turned the pages of Golden Books, and I gradually learned to read.

Not all of E. Nesbit’s children’s books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.

Like most people, I find watching the lazy and quiet underwater realm of a big aquarium exceptionally calming.

For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up.

Many cultures believe that on a certain day – Halloween, the Irish Samhain Eve, Mexico’s ‘Dia de los Muertos’ – the veil between this world and the next is especially thin.

At any given moment, I’ve always assumed that nearly everyone around me was smarter than I was, more naturally gifted, quicker-witted, and probably capable of understanding Heidegger and Derrida.

With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction – mysteries, fantasy, and adventure – as eccentric or merely antiquarian.

Because of Kipling, I’ve sometimes wondered about keeping a mongoose about the house. But given the cobra population in Silver Spring, Maryland – zero, when last I checked – we hardly need a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

Sometimes the very best of all summer books is a blank notebook. Get one big enough, and you can practice sketching the lemon slice in your drink or the hot lifeguard on the beach or the vista down the hill from your cabin.

I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so I’m not going to diss them. But you don’t really have any guarantees that what you’re reading wasn’t written out of friendship or spite.

To my mind, ‘Dear Brutus’ stands halfway between Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s ‘Into the Woods’. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.