Michael Dirda Quotes

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.

What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness.

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.

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.

I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity.

I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace.

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

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

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

Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.

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

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

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.

In truth, I'm not really a cat person. Seamus, the wonder dog, still deeply mourned by all who knew him, was just about the only pet I've ever really loved.

'The Admirable Crichton' is probably Barrie's most famous work after 'Peter Pan', nearly a pendant to that classic.

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.

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.

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.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.