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
Like most people, I find watching the lazy and quiet underwater realm of a big aquarium exceptionally calming. – Michael Dirda
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
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
I’ve always liked an easygoing, colloquial style. I like the kind of reviewer who is essentially a fellow reader, an enthusiast, a fan. – Michael Dirda
What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them. – Michael Dirda
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
My gift, if that’s not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them. – Michael Dirda
None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we’d like, but we can still make a stab at it. – Michael Dirda
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
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
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
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. – Michael Dirda
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. – Michael Dirda
Carl Barks was born in Merrill, Oregon, in 1901, grew up in a farming family, and eventually held a number of blue-collar jobs. He knew what it was to be poor and to work hard for a living. – Michael Dirda
Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn’t tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur over this, that, and the other. – Michael Dirda
