Quotes from Michael Dirda

The patient accretion of knowledge, the focusing of all one's energies on some problem in history or science, the dogged pursuit of excellence of whatever kind -- these are right and proper ideals for life.

I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mown backyard? A verandah overlooking the summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother's lap.

A good rule of thumb is: Pack twice as many books as changes of underwear.

Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement.

I also think of some books as my friends and i like to have them around. They brighten my life.

if you are given lined paper, write crosswise. At least occassionally.

The memory of a tone, the rhythm of an author's sentences, the sorrow we felt on a novel's last page--perhaps that is all that we can expect to keep from books.

Some of us, alas, are destined to find our escapes in novels, not life.

we learn best by placing our 'confidence in men and women whose examples invite us to love what they love'(Robert Wilken).

the humanities encourage the development of our own humanity. They are our instruments of self-exploration.

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.

As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

On any given day I'm likely to be working here 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. --Going, Going, Gone

Many people feel most alive, most fulfilled, when they violate the dictates of conscience or even the promptings of their own self interest.

A writer's greatest challenge, though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes -- even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.

None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we'd like, but we can still make a stab at it. Why deny yourself all that pleasure? so look around tonight or this weekend, see what catches your fancy on the bookshelf, at the library, or in the bookstore. Maybe try something a little unusual, a little different. And then don't stop. Do it again, with a new book or an old author the following week. Go on--be bold, be insatiable, be restlessly, unashamedly promiscuous.

Corny as it sounds, I believe that unless we try to familiarize ourselves with the best that human beings have thought and accomplished, we doom ourselves to be little more than mindless consumer-wraiths, docile sheep waiting to be shorn by corporation or government, sad and confused dwellers on the threshold of a palace we never enter.

and yet the original Writers at Work volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own. As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.

I was sent an advanced proof of "The Last Bookseller" — due out in November — and highly recommend it, partly for Goodman's portrait of a lost world, but also for its colorful dramatis personae. Goodman once knew a book scout — the biblio-equivalent of an antiques picker — who "was so far off the grid he lived in the woods under a tarp. Michael Dirda, Washington Post

While I love most, not to say all, of James Thurber's cartoons, there are a handful that seem especially

It's an old chestnut to say that we need to keep challenging ourselves throughout life. Samuel Beckett memorably declared, Try again. Fail again. Fail better, while T.S. Eliot proclaimed that Old men ought to be explorers. More bluntly, Cyril Connolly maintained that we should cast aside whatever piece of iridescent mediocrity we are wasting our time with and get down to creating a masterpiece.