Michael Dirda Quotes

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.

I'm much more into someone who is telling stories than somebody who is writing a record about their breakup. It's just more interesting for me.

That's one of the great thing about writing is that you get to be in someone's head.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company.

Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.

With 'A Northern Light,' I've already heard from teenage readers, teachers, librarians - it's been so gratifying. It's amazing that you can take something that matters so deeply to you and make it matter to someone else.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.

I love seeing my book on shelves and getting letters from people who liked the book. I love telling stories and having other people tell stories to me.

Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.

The ability to absorb a book and make someone else's words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.