Michael Dirda Quotes

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.

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is ‘ghost story‘ time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve always liked an easygoing, colloquial style. I like the kind of reviewer who is essentially a fellow reader, an enthusiast, a fan.

With concerted effort, I can follow written instructions, but don’t ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smartphone.

Young people looking for adventure fiction now generally turn to fantasy, but for those of a certain age, the spy thriller has long been the escape reading of choice.

Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities.

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world – or at least all of Europe – aspired to be Parisian.

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they’ve loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.

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

When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.

In truth, I’m not really a cat person. Seamus, the wonder dog, still deeply mourned by all who knew him, was just about the only pet I’ve ever really loved.

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.

In classic noir fiction and film, it is always hot. Fans whirr in sweltering hotel rooms, sweat forms on a stranger‘s brow, the muggy air stifles – one can hardly breathe. Come nightfall, there is no relief, only the darkness that allows illicit lovers to meet, the trusted to betray, and murderers to act.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I don’t like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

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.

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.

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.

With any luck, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good cafe in one corner, serving dark beer and kielbasa to keep up one’s strength while browsing, and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victoria‘s Secret catalogs.

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

I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books.

When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I’m tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else’s life offends my vanity.

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.

Mentoring is the last refuge of the older artist. With luck, disciples will keep one’s books in print, one’s reputation alive.

When I come to visit my mom – every two or three months – I generally spend five or six hours with her each day. She’s always immensely glad to see me, her eldest child, her only son.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I’m nothing if not a literary hedonist.

It’s a sad commentary on our time – to use a phrase much favored by my late father – that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

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

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.