Michael Dirda Quotes

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

You're more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery.

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

If I couldn't use food or love to define contentment, I would use reading.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Reading should be a repeat performance.

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

I don't reread my books.

My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!

My criteria for what makes a book an official 'favorite,' is based almost entirely on how desperately I don't want the story to end.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there's a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page.

It had to be a book that held my attention and kept me wanting to read it; when my husband finished 'The Road', I started it straight away and didn't put it down until I finished - it was such an achievement and relief to know that I could read, comprehend and, most importantly, enjoy a book!

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

Books look handsome and it's a real singular experience getting to go to a bookstore. I don't want to not do that.

I read the novel 'Miracle at St. Anna' when it was first released, and I loved it.

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.