Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood. "
Michael Dirda
Age
Hollywood
Worship
Related Quotes:
" I've been slightly obsessed with paper and notebooks. Among my most precious possessions is a small light-blue, breviary-sized volume - four-and-a-half inches wide, seven inches tall - made by a company called Denbigh. "
Michael Dirda
Precious
Small
Tall
" 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
Communication
Learning
World
" Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world. "
Michael Dirda
Life
Hands
Book
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Day
Me
Mom
" I love the look of books published by the firm of Rupert Hart-Davis: They strike me as handsome, elegant, and inviting. I'll pick up almost anything with that imprint, especially if it's in a jacket or priced low. "
Michael Dirda
Love
Me
Look
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Women
Long
Talent
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Children
Business
Family
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
School
World
Children
" I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history. "
Michael Dirda
Man
History
Than
" In my own case, my folks didn't actually object to comics, as many parents did, but they pretty much felt the things were a waste of time. "
Michael Dirda
Own
My Own
Parents
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Like
Long
Art
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Me
Care
Paper
" Books don't only furnish a room: they also make the best holiday gifts. "
Michael Dirda
Only
Books
Best
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Know
Library
Reflection
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Books
Boy
Library
" Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities. "
Michael Dirda
Fresh
Desk
Keep
" 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
Money
Yellow
Train
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
More
Moment
Understanding
" A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium. "
Michael Dirda
Soul
Finish
Easy
" I'm nothing if not a literary hedonist. "
Michael Dirda
Nothing
Literary
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Dramatic
Know
First
" Writers keep writing and publishers publishing - it never grows boring. "
Michael Dirda
Boring
Writing
Publishing
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Process
Years
Reading
" Adventurous reading allows one to escape a little from the provincialities of one's home culture and the blinders of one's narrow self. "
Michael Dirda
Self
Reading
Home
" 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
Meet
Hotel
Hot
" 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. "
Michael Dirda
Me
Mom
Parents
" Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style. "
Michael Dirda
Style
Sometimes
Say
" Every summer, I regret that I didn't become a college teacher. Such a sweet life! With all that vacation time! You'll never get me to believe that being a tenured professor at a good college is anything but Heaven on earth. "
Michael Dirda
Good
Vacation
Time
" Born in 1910, Wilfrid Thesiger spent his childhood in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as it was then called, where his father was an important and much-admired British official. "
Michael Dirda
Father
Important
Then
" I'm sometimes willing to put in vast, even inordinate amounts of time if I find a project that interests me. "
Michael Dirda
Time
Even
Sometimes