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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But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
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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 cannot think of a day in my life when the library didn’t exert a potent attraction for me, offering a sense of the specialness of each individual’s curiosity and his or her quest to satisfy it.
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People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks.
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It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.
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The whole idea with the show from the start was to go international.
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I'm not there to be the token sexy girl. I don't know that I would ever be able to pull that off. It's nice that those characters I've played feel uncomfortable as well because it's so much more realistic.
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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.
