Michael Dirda

I didn't work for any newspapers in college, never worked for any newspaper before 'The Washington Post'.

My own particular feline companion answers, or rather doesn't answer, to Cinnamon. One of my kids must have given her the name, even though she's mostly gray and white.

Adventurous reading allows one to escape a little from the provincialities of one's home culture and the blinders of one's narrow self.

I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history.

I'm an appreciator. I love all kinds of books, and I want others to love them, too.

Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills.

Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style.

I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

I'm sometimes willing to put in vast, even inordinate amounts of time if I find a project that interests me.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that M. Dirda is a sucker for anything bookish in the way of artwork.

I've always liked an easygoing, colloquial style. I like the kind of reviewer who is essentially a fellow reader, an enthusiast, a fan.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

Because of Kipling, I've sometimes wondered about keeping a mongoose about the house. But given the cobra population in Silver Spring, Maryland - zero, when last I checked - we hardly need a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.

While Napoleon believed his fortunes to be governed by destiny, his real genius lay in self-control and martial daring coupled with an indomitable will to power.

Once upon a time, I sat in my mother's lap as she turned the pages of Golden Books, and I gradually learned to read.

The only kind of notebook I actively dislike is the steno pad, entirely because of that vertical line down the middle of the page. I presume it has some arcane secretarial use, but to me, it's both ugly and confusing.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

Many cultures believe that on a certain day - Halloween, the Irish Samhain Eve, Mexico's 'Dia de los Muertos' - the veil between this world and the next is especially thin.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.