Paul Collins Quotes & Sayings

If a book cover has raised lettering, metallic lettering, or raised metallic lettering, then it is telling the reader: Hello. I am an easy-to-read work on espionage, romance, a celebrity, and/or murder. To readers who do not care for such things, this lettering tells them: Hello. I am crap. — Paul Collins

Leatherbound books are an expensive form of wallpaper, and yet every English nobleman's home seems to have had them. Their endless sets of the works of Cooper and Scott and Goethe, in finely tanned bindings with marbled endpapers, all end up with this sort of dealer sooner or later. I look through a set of Cooper and, without surprise, find uncut pages: these books were never actually read. — Paul Collins

Captain, sir,' called Coster from the rear of the shed. 'Cleared to shit.'
'Proceed,' Fa'ared called back.
The Preceptor glared at Coster. 'Can you not wait? — Paul Collins

Historically, dust jackets are a new concern for authors; you don't see them much before the 1920s. And dust jacket is a strange name for this contrivance, as if books had anything to fear from dust. If you store a book properly, standing up, then the jacket doesn't cover the one part of the book that is actually exposed to dust, which is the top of the pages. So a dust jacket is no such thing at all; it is really a sort of advertising wrapper, like the brown paper sheath on a Hershey's bar. On this wrapper goes the manufacturer's name, the ingredients
some blithering about unforgettable characters or gemlike prose or gripping narrative
and a brief summation of who does what to whom in our gripping, unforgettable, gemlike object. — Paul Collins

Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. ... But autism ... is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over-expression of the very traits that make our species unique. — Paul Collins

I sometimes wonder whether century-old ruins look so beautiful to us beacause they were *meant* to ruin in a beautiful way. There was a Romantic facination with structural decay; wealthy gentry had custom-built ruins erected on their estates, their own little Country Churchyards to elegize in — Paul Collins

Above all, an author must write passionately and edit dispassionately. Poe's willingness to ruthlessly strip down and rebuild his old poems showed a dedication to craft that a professional must have, one that quickly wilts most amateurs. — Paul Collins

But above all, an author must write passionately and edit passionately. — Paul Collins

If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity. — Paul Collins

Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg. — Paul Collins

Curb your fretting, tadpole, or the frog of your future will fail to croak.'
-Thaddeus — Paul Collins

Generally, when a man is rabidly for one cause, and then is just as rabidly for another cause, it is not because he loves the cause: it is because he loves the rabies — Paul Collins

Many people are partial to the notion that ... all writers are somehow mere vessels for Truth and Beauty when they compose. That we are not really in control. This is a variation on that twee little fable that writers like to pass off on gullible readers, that a character can develop a will of his own and 'take over a book.' This makes writing sound supernatural and mysterious, like possession by faeries. The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen. — Paul Collins

Put the penis schematic away, he told the coroner. — Paul Collins