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

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

" 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. "

" Some travelers collect souvenirs, postcards, or bumper stickers; I bring home a pencil from the various places I visit. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Long ago, I realized that my only talent - aside from the rugged good looks, of course, and the strange power I hold over elderly women - can be reduced to a single word: doggedness. "

" 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. "

" Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I haven't read for pleasure in 35 years. I mean, I get a lot of pleasure from what I read... For me, it's gotten so that it doesn't seem as though I've read a book unless I've written about it. It really seems the completion of the reading process. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People who've read my reviews know my tastes, know how I approach a book, know my background. I can write with believable authority. It doesn't mean I'm always right. "

" 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. "