Art Quote by Michael Dirda

“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.”

Michael Dirda

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 2.5 out of 5 (6 ratings)

More by Michael Dirda

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure…

Michael Dirda

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.

Michael Dirda

Image

To my mind, 'Dear Brutus' stands halfway between Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 'Into the Woods'. Like them,…

Michael Dirda

Image

The goal of a just society should be to provide satisfying work with a living wage to all its citizens.

Michael Dirda

Image

Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn't tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur…

Michael Dirda

Image

“Books, by their very nature and variety, help us grow in empathy for others, in tolerance and awareness. But they should increase our skepticism as well as our humanity, for all good readers know how easy it is to misread. What counts is to stay receptive and open, to reserve judgment and try to foresee consequences, to avoid the facile…

Michael Dirda

My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that…

Michael Dirda

Image

Once we know the plot and its surprises, we can appreciate a book's artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with tenderness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters - as a good first reader ought - we can now look at how the book…

Michael Dirda

My wife tells me I should check out 'Downton Abbey', but I gather that series might be almost too intense for my temperate nature.

Michael Dirda

Image

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…

Michael Dirda

Image

I once read that in vaudeville, it was often the straight guy who got paid more than the comic because that's the tougher job.…

Michael Dirda

Image

From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the December issue of almost any general-interest magazine regularly featured a holiday horror or two.

Michael Dirda

Image

Explore all 131 Michael Dirda quotes

More Art quotes

True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Image

Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and…

Benjamin Franklin

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Aeschylus

Image

I think most artists feel like they're outside society - no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your…

Aaron Rose

Image

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

Erich Fromm

Image

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury

Image

“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and…

Justina Chen Headley