Browsings Quotes

“I also think of some books as my friends and i like to have them around. They brighten my life.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“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.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“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.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“On any given day I’m likely to be working here at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences—or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.
--Going, Going, Gone”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“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.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“radio, I do use this product myself—I sometimes wonder how many David Foster Wallace fans know about his contributions. He comments, for instance, on the following words: “all of,”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we'd like, but we can still make a stab at it. Why deny yourself all that pleasure? so look around tonight or this weekend, see what catches your fancy on the bookshelf, at the library, or in the bookstore. Maybe try something a little unusual, a little different. And then don't stop. Do it again, with a new book or an old author the following week. Go on--be bold, be insatiable, be restlessly, unashamedly promiscuous.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“It's an old chestnut to say that we need to keep challenging ourselves throughout life. Samuel Beckett memorably declared, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better," while T.S. Eliot proclaimed that "Old men ought to be explorers." More bluntly, Cyril Connolly maintained that we should cast aside whatever "piece of iridescent mediocrity" we are wasting our time with and get down to creating a masterpiece.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“While I love most, not to say all, of James Thurber’s cartoons, there are a handful that seem especially”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“I like first editions, though I’ll sometimes settle for a later printing if it’s within a year or two of the book’s original publication date. Only these editions possess that distinctive aura of the original, a glamour that subsequent reissues can never recapture. That said, I do gravitate toward well printed, scholarly treatments of certain classic texts, with lots of notes and a good bibliography. If I’m going to spend my life reading books, I want my experiences to be optimal.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“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.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“and yet the original Writers at Work volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own. 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.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings