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
I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet. – Michael Dirda
Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing. – Michael Dirda
I once read that in vaudeville, it was often the straight guy who got paid more than the comic because that’s the tougher job. He has to set up the jokes in just the right way. – Michael Dirda
People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I’m addicted, that I’m no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers. – Michael Dirda
Young people looking for adventure fiction now generally turn to fantasy, but for those of a certain age, the spy thriller has long been the escape reading of choice. – Michael Dirda
Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I’m reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought. – Michael Dirda
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
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
My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they’ve loved in the past and see what else those authors have written. – Michael Dirda
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
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
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. – Michael Dirda
Summertime, and the reading is easy… Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February. – Michael Dirda
Basically, I think that most people either make too much money or not enough money. The jobs that are essential and important pay too little, and those that are essentially managerial pay far too much. – Michael Dirda
I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood. – Michael Dirda
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. – Michael Dirda
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
Any man’s death diminishes us, but when an artist passes away, we lose not just an island but an entire archipelago. – Michael Dirda
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
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
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers. – Michael Dirda
Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author’s company. – Michael Dirda
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
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. – Michael Dirda
For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up. – Michael Dirda
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
While Napoleon believed his fortunes to be governed by destiny, his real genius lay in self-control and martial daring coupled with an indomitable will to power. – Michael Dirda
Some travelers collect souvenirs, postcards, or bumper stickers; I bring home a pencil from the various places I visit. – Michael Dirda