Michael Dirda

Books don't only furnish a room: they also make the best holiday gifts.

A job should bring enough for a worker and family to live on, but after that, self-realization, the exercise of one's gifts and talents, is what truly matters.

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.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly.

Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.