122 Quotes by Michael Dirda

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut’s ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That’s what most writers really care about.

Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement.

I sometimes lie awake at night and try to imagine what would be the best period in history to spend one’s seventy-odd years.

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.

A writer’s greatest challenge, though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes – even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.

As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh – they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

The memory of a tone, the rhythm of an author’s sentences, the sorrow we felt on a novel’s last page – perhaps that is all that we can expect to keep from books.

Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection.

Many people feel most alive, most fulfilled, when they violate the dictates of conscience or even the promptings of their own self interest.