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

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" What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them. "

" Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People who've read my reviews know my tastes, know how I approach a book, know my background. I can write with believable authority. It doesn't mean I'm always right. "

" For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. "

" 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. "

" Every summer, I regret that I didn't become a college teacher. Such a sweet life! With all that vacation time! You'll never get me to believe that being a tenured professor at a good college is anything but Heaven on earth. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings. "

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

" 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. "

" 'The Admirable Crichton' is probably Barrie's most famous work after 'Peter Pan', nearly a pendant to that classic. "

" With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction - mysteries, fantasy, and adventure - as eccentric or merely antiquarian. "

" Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself - of poems and stories and essays - delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters. "

" For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia's Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing. "

" I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over. "

" 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. "

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

" In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance. "

" 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 over this, that, and the other. "

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

" 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. "

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