122 Quotes by Michael Dirda

Best selling authors are always worth listening to, even if you choose to ignore their advice.

Some of us, alas, are destined to find our escapes in novels, not life.

Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.

I am shocked that we seemed to have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from Vietnam.

I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mown backyard? A verandah overlooking the summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother’s lap.

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

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.

Halloween isn't the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter's tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.

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.