Michael Dirda Quotes
The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
Quotes to Explore
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The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
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The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.
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I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
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All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.
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I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.
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I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,' 'tender' or 'universal.'
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Youku Tudou is a hybrid, like combining Netflix and YouTube. Like Netflix, with Youku, which launched in 2005, we syndicate a library of longform content and create original content. The Tudou model started with user-generated content but is increasingly becoming about partner-generated programming.
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Travel teaches as much as books.
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There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb.
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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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Books are still my favorite present.
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I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.
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The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
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In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
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I do not carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.
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I don't have any great first job tales: I've never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me.
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When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library. I thought that was fine. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn't say anything.
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I spent more time at the library than anyone my age when I was a kid.
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I cry in movies a lot, and over books.
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Yes, gymnasts aim for perfection, but I never thought about the score. If that's what's in your mind, it will probably mess you up.
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I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.
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Books that kids read should be about what is going on in the world.
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I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.
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The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
