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" In classic noir fiction and film, it is always hot. Fans whirr in sweltering hotel rooms, sweat forms on a stranger's brow, the muggy air stifles - one can hardly breathe. Come nightfall, there is no relief, only the darkness that allows illicit lovers to meet, the trusted to betray, and murderers to act. "

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" To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal. "

Michael Dirda

Language

Intellectual

Boy

" 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. "

" Mentoring is the last refuge of the older artist. With luck, disciples will keep one's books in print, one's reputation alive. "

" With concerted effort, I can follow written instructions, but don't ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smartphone. "

" In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries. "

" Late summer is perfect for classic mysteries - think of Raymond Chandler's hot Santa Anas and Agatha Christie's Mediterranean resorts - while big ambitious works of nonfiction are best approached in September and early October, when we still feel energetic and the grass no longer needs to be cut. "

" People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I'm addicted, that I'm no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers. "

" 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. "

" In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy. "

" I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books. "

" Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents' Code. "

Michael Dirda

Mom

Parents

" My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written. "

" The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me. "

" No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I'm seldom drawn to a book unless it's by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me. "

Michael Dirda

Care

Paper

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

" Summertime, and the reading is easy... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February. "

" Halloween isn't the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter's tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee. "

" Any man's death diminishes us, but when an artist passes away, we lose not just an island but an entire archipelago. "

" Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian. "

" It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies. "

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

" Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world. "

" I'm nothing if not a literary hedonist. "

Michael Dirda

Nothing

Literary

" Writers keep writing and publishers publishing - it never grows boring. "

" 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. "

Michael Dirda

Down

Page

" At any given moment, I've always assumed that nearly everyone around me was smarter than I was, more naturally gifted, quicker-witted, and probably capable of understanding Heidegger and Derrida. "

Michael Dirda

Moment

Understanding

" I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood. "

" At 17, I traveled to Mexico in a lemon yellow Mustang and saved money by bunking down in cheap, cockroach-infested flophouses. In my early 20s, I went on to thumb rides through Europe, readily sleeping in train stations, my backpack as a pillow. Once I even hunkered down for a night on a sidewalk grate - for warmth - in Paris. "

" Back in the 1950s and '60s, J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchard's gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook. "

" Long ago, I realized that my only talent - aside from the rugged good looks, of course, and the strange power I hold over elderly women - can be reduced to a single word: doggedness. "