Quotes by Michael Dirda - Page 3

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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Beer
Dark
Found
Heaven
Luck
Secret
Serving
Used
Victoria
Victoria's Secret
Angels
Around
Bookstore
Cafe
Catalogs
Itself
Corner
Vast
Resemble
While
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This Is Not a Novel memorializes the treasures and detritus of one man's singularly cultured mind. (...) If you don't know Writer's work at all, try This Is Not a Novel. There may be some doubt about exactly what kind of book it is, but not that it's altogether wonderful.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Men
Book
Doubt
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Home
Dry
Given
Pebbles
Seashore
Sentences
Stones
Typing
Time Great Beautiful
Time Home Great
Beautifully
Working
Finds
Gradually
Over
Likely
Seem
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In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein set out to showcase, in sometimes startling ways, the continuing relevance of a classic philosopher. But what's remarkable is that she actually brings off this tour de force with both madcap brilliance and commanding authority.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Philosopher
Plato
Way
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Communication
Latin
Middle Ages
Renaissance
Ages
All The World
Aspired
Displaced
Eighteenth
Eighteenth Century
Gradually
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Accounts
Gross
Monetary
Symbols
Work Believe People
Absurdly
Bank
Bloated
Ensuring
Firmly
Preserve
Privileges
Professions
Rewarded
Status
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Cash
Editors
Projects
Significant
Tempted
Advance
Biography
Offends
Researching
Suggest
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Christmas
Hook
Interpretation
Mary
Particular
Peter
Television
Camp
Captain
Network
Network Television
Pan
Peter Pan
Regularly
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Late summer is perfect for classic mysteries - think of Raymond Chandler's hot Santa Anas and Agatha Christie's Mediterranean resorts - while big ambitious works of nonfiction are best approached in September and early October, when we still feel energetic and the grass no longer needs to be cut.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Ambitious
Classic
Energetic
Grass
Nonfiction
October
Santa
September
Mediterranean
Mysteries
Raymond
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Air
Betray
Breathe
Classic
Fans
Hotel
Hotel Rooms
Lovers
Noir
Relief
Rooms
Stranger
Sweat
Trusted
Brow
Forms
Hardly
Meet
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Arabia
Chorus
Dozen
Empty
Account
Camel
Join
Journeys
Punishing
Quarter
Revere
Sands
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At 17, I traveled to Mexico in a lemon yellow Mustang and saved money by bunking down in cheap, cockroach-infested flophouses. In my early 20s, I went on to thumb rides through Europe, readily sleeping in train stations, my backpack as a pillow. Once I even hunkered down for a night on a sidewalk grate - for warmth - in Paris.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Early 20s
Mexico
Pillow
Saved
Sidewalk
Stations
Traveled
Warmth
Yellow
Backpack
Cheap
Lemon
Readily
Rides
Sleeping
Thumb
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[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Art
Talking
Writing
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In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Display
Interrupted
Splendor
Worthy
Above
English
Crossed
Fireplace
Fundamentally
Libraries
Lined
Pair
Perhaps
Portrait
Swords
Walls
Yearn
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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.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Mother
Reading
Summer
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Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Axes
Battle
Velvet
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Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Book
Self
Writing
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In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Art
Character
Husband
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Once we know the plot and its surprises, we can appreciate a book's artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with tenderness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters - as a good first reader ought - we can now look at how the book works, and instead of swooning over it like a besotted lover begin to appreciate its intricacy and craftmanship. Surprisingly, such dissection doesn't murder the experience. Just the opposite: Only then does a work of art fully live.
Michael Dirda / Critic
Art
Book
Passion
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Michael Dirda Quotes - Page 3

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