Quotes by Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn’t writing, he wasn’t showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.

Art

Talking

Writing

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

Advice

Listening

Selling

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

Absolutely Nothing

Shocked

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.

Mother

Reading

Summer

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.

Lying

Night

Years

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.

People

Thinking

World

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

Essence

Kindness

Thinking

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma’s later experience of men). (…) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.

Art

Character

Husband

In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein set out to showcase, in sometimes startling ways, the continuing relevance of a classic philosopher. But what’s remarkable is that she actually brings off this tour de force with both madcap brilliance and commanding authority.

Philosopher

Plato

Way

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

Editing

Faithful

Writing

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Absolutely Nothing

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Quotes by Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda

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

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

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.

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.

In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein set out to showcase, in sometimes startling ways, the continuing relevance of a classic philosopher. But what’s remarkable is that she actually brings off this tour de force with both madcap brilliance and commanding authority.

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

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Topics by Michael Dirda

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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