Paperback Quotes

“It's time for bed. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.
***
Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get rolled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it's like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It's a Campbell's Chunky Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.”

— Nicholson Baker

“The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.”

— Nicholson Baker

“I was wondering how Ms. Hetley, who seemed to occupy just about every slot on the New York Times hardback, paperback, and e-book bestseller lists, had managed to wring eight five-hundred-page installments out of the concept of wars between rival gangs of vampires and wizards when it seemed obvious to me that all a wizard would have to do to kick a vampire's ass was pounce on it during the day while it was sleeping. How could anyone take this stuff seriously, I wondered. Hetley's graphic depictions of wizard-on-vampire sex, which was creating a bloodthirsty, mutant race of evil, soulless 'vampards', seemed absurd.”

— Adam Langer

“I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was "simpler," as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood. On the Banks of Plum Creek clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my Plum Creek paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform and a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair, On the Banks of Plum Creek was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura World than it did in real life.”

— Wendy McClure

“Carol would not be a bad one to [settle down] with. She's pretty and bright, and maybe this is what love is. She's good company: her interests broaden almost every day. She reads three books to my one, and I read a lot. We talk far into the night. She still doesn't understand the first edition game: Hemingway, she says, reads just as well in a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first printing. I can still hear myself lecturing her the first time she said that. Only a fool would read a first edition. Simply having such a book makes life in general and Hemingway in particular go better when you do break out the reading copies. I listened to myself and thought, This woman must think I'm a government-inspected horse's ass. Then I showed her my Faulkners, one with a signature, and I saw her shiver with an almost sexual pleasure as she touched the paper where he signed. Faulkner was her most recent god[.]”

— John Dunning

“I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed with his chest to both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation.
A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding that we have in dreams , that I had just glimpsed one possible future self.”

— James Sallis

“A walk is exploring surfaces and textures with finger, toe, and-yuck-tongue; standing still and seeing who or what comes by; trying out different forms of locomotion (among them running, marching, high-kicking, galloping, scooting, projectile falling, spinning, and noisy shuffling). It is archeology: exploring the bit of discarded candy wrapper; collecting a fistful of pebbles and a twig and a torn corner of a paperback; swishing dirt back and forth along the ground. It is stopping to admire the murmuring of the breeze in the trees; locating the source of the bird's song; pointing. Pointing!- using the arm to extend one's fallen gaze so someone else can see what you've seen. It is a time of sharing. On our block,”

— Alexandra Horowitz

“You asked me to be an open book. As I've already told you, I am. Anything you need to know about me can be found. Don't confuse me, a paperback, with a book on tape.”

— Darnell Lamont Walker

“Books might be your passion but you can't fuck a paperback.”

— Alexandra Potter

“Actually, he hadn't just complained; she'd come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters that he sometimes had trouble pulling it out. When she asked him what he was doing, he explained in a calm and serious voice that he was trying to kill the book before it killed him.”

— Tom Perrotta

“Found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters”

— Tom Perrotta

“So you like to read? Or listen, anyway?"
"I've found it helps me stay on the treadmill longer. But I always like to have a paperback on hand, too. I need to swing by the bookstore for another one, actually.”

— Cindi Madsen

“Maybe I'll just go ahead and buy her the Tufte book. I'll bring it wrapped in brown paper. Wait- is that weird? It's an expensive book. Maybe there's a low-key paperback edition. I could buy it on Amazon. That's stupid, I work at a bookstore. (Could Amazon ship it fast enough?)”

— Robin Sloan

“[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.”

— Paul Auster

“Everything's digital now, but sometimes I'll buy a paperback if I love the book. I love the smell of them too. Like the first time you open them up, and they're fresh and new. Or old books,”

— Jay McLean

“I have a weak spot for late '60s-early '70s yippie paperbacks and protest manifestos. I find them at flea markets or online. One of my favorites is 'Right On,' a compendium of student protests made into this 95-cent paperback with the most amazing graphics.”

— Doug Aitken

“On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion ... everything slides off ... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?”

— Bill Bryson

“Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.”

— Adam Ross

“Making lots of money
it's not that hard, you know. It's overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch. ch. 1, p. 23 in Penguin paperback”

— Martin Amis

“You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need, and it won't be what you imagine - you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains; and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart; and the battered paperback you revisit every April because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that what's important is not everything that you've accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you.”

— Jodi Picoult

“Sometimes, after they'd done the shopping, they would stop, each with his or her cart, in front of a bookstore that carried the paperback edition of his book. His wife would point to it and say: you're still there. Invariably, he would nod and then they would continue browsing the mall stores. Did he know her or didn't he? He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“I need a job and I want to be a paperback writer ...”

— The Beatles

“But not in "normal" people like me. They don't realize that evil lives on their street. Works in the cubicle next to them. Chats with them in the checkout line at CVS. Reads a paperback on the train next to them. Runs on a treadmill at their gym. Or marries their daughter. We're here, and we prey on you. We target you. We groom you.”

— Lisa Scottoline

“For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“In my ideal world, my next novel would have a first printing of, say, 2,500 hardcovers for reviewers, libraries, collectors, and autograph hounds. The publisher could print more copies if they get low. And simultaneously, or six weeks later, the book would be available in paperback.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“They understood that. They all understood it. This is not the same as comprehension, but it was good enough. When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America.”

— Stephen King

“You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels.”

— Heather O'Neill

“I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, 'The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.'”

— William T. Vollmann

“I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea.”

— William Peter Blatty

“A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.”

— Anne Fadiman

“One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are "pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours." Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.”

— Anne Fadiman

“There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.”

— Nicholson Baker

“Stephen King consummately honors several traditions with his rare paperback original, 'Joyland.' He addresses the novel of carny life and sideshows, where the midway serves as microcosm, such as in those famous books by Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney and William Lindsay Gresham.”

— Paul Di Filippo

“It's great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity.”

— Russell Smith

“OUTLANDER A Delta Book PUBLISHING HISTORY Delacorte Press hardcover edition published 1991 Delta trade paperback edition/July 2001 Published by Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc.”

— Diana Gabaldon

“'The Outsiders' died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.”

— S.E. Hinton

“Reading is not as insignificant as we claim. First we must steal the key to the library. Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book's door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover, and in broad daylight escape! We are no longer there: this is what real reading is. If we haven't left the room, if we haven't gone over the wall, we're not reading.”

— Hélène Cixous

“My father went to work by train every day. It was half an hour's journey each way, and he would read a paperback in four journeys. After supper, we all sat down to read - it was long before TV, remember!”

— Maeve Binchy

“By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He'd almost read his father's full library and arrived at last at Moby Dick. The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you'll see.”

— Niall Williams

“And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained.
And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.”

— Dorothy Allison

“Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book's plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea.”

— Michael Ondaatje

“Heidegger wrote a book called Was Ist Das Ding - What Is a Thing? which was kind of interesting and influential to me, as a matter of fact. It's a small paperback, which I read. It's about the nature of thingness; what is it? It's a very penetrating analysis of that, and I think a rather influential book. I know other artists who have read it and come up with it.”

— Robert Barry

“The notorious tendency of conservative apologists and New Age paperback writers alike is to leap from mere possibility to the right to believe. "If there might be space aliens, we can assume there are." "If the idea of Atlantis is not impossible, we can take it for granted." "If the traditional view of gospel authorship cannot be definitievely debunked, we can go right on assuming it's truth." No, you can't.”

— Robert M. Price

“Some of you ... have never read a Patrick O'Brian novel. I beseech you to start now. Start with Master and Commander, which should be available in paperback from your nearest bookseller. And if he-or she-does not have a copy, then beat the wretched fellow.”

— Kevin Myers

“If you carry a paperback book in your back pocket, but spend more time on your hair than you do reading it, you're probably a bad actor.”

— Dov Davidoff

“None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that's kept me alive is the books that are in paperback. People find them, they like them, and they pass them on.”

— James Purdy

“I'm trying to think of other ones. Oh, yeah, I'd say - somebody would buy something and we'd say, and because you are our hundredth customer today, you get a free paperback.”

— Steve Martin

“Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination.”

— Florence King

“I don't care if it's Bruno Mars or Aerosmith or ZZ Top ... it's about songs. 'Paperback Writer,' 'Satisfaction,' 'Cat Scratch Fever,' 'Walk This Way,' all the killer songs in the world start with an identifiable guitar pattern that is basically a bastardization of either honky-tonk or boogie-woogie. And that's in every cool piece of music in the world that you and I love.”

— Ted Nugent

“I'd just begun to be taken seriously as a freelance writer, but after the Playboy article, I mostly got requests to go underground in some other semi-sexual way. It was so bad that I returned an advance to turn the Playboy article into a paperback, even though I had to borrow the money.”

— Gloria Steinem