Paperback Quotes

I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

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

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.

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.

For years I’d understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.

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.

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

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.

‘The Outsiders’ died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.

Software is becoming no different than a videotape or a record album or a paperback book, and not all of us are ready for that change.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.

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.

I’ve never been on a paperback tour before, you know, because usually you go on tour when a hardcover comes out.

When the Beatles wrote ‘Paperback Writer,’ it couldn’t have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it’s not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.

I write a kind of surreal fantasy, but they can’t put ‘surreal fantasy’ on a paperback.

‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I’ve heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.

When I started writing, I just hoped for a nice little paperback series.

The technology I like is the American paperback edition of ‘Freedom.’ I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology.

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.

I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture – the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers – books still make sense.

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.

Publishers should use the paperback side to leverage the ebook side.

There was a mission: To match the cover of ‘Extraordinary’ to the cover of the paperback ‘Impossible,’ which was commercially successful. Consider the outdoor natural setting, the single girl in motion with her hair blowing, and the cursive font used for the title; both covers have these in common.

I was given a thick paperback copy of the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ when I was 11 years old, and I read it gluttonously, cover to cover, paying special lip-smacking attention to all the incredibly gruesome chapters about the violence of human history.

Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.

The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. ‘Don’t bother me about my past,’ I’ll say, ‘It’s out in paperback now.’

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.’

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

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!