Quotes About Michael Dirda

I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity.

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

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.

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

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.

The only kind of notebook I actively dislike is the steno pad, entirely because of that vertical line down the middle of the page. I presume it has some arcane secretarial use, but to me, it's both ugly and confusing.