Paperback Quotes & Sayings

It was then that my gaze happened to fall on the bookcase, on the gap there, where the old paperback of "Nine Stories" had fallen flat. "Where's the thing?" I said.
"What thing?"
"The mesh. My mesh."
She shrugged. "I tossed it."
"Tossed it? Where? What do you mean?"
In the next moment I was in the kitchen, flipping open the lid of the trash can, only to find it empty. "You mean outside?" I shouted. "In the dumpster?"
When I came thundering back into the room, she still hadn't moved. "Jesus, what were you thinking? That was mine. I wanted that. I wanted to keep it."
Her lips barely moved. "It was dirty. — T.C. Boyle

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

He was like nothing she'd ever known.
Marcii hoped she would come to know him, for he was all she could ever have asked for and more. — Ross Turner

The price of an e-book is a lot less than the price that we're charging for a hardcover book. It's about the same as we charge for a paperback. And that means a different revenue stream. — Jonathan Galassi

I really started self-publishing on a serious level in 2002. Those smaller books did well, ended up moving from doing a series to compiling everything into a trade paperback in about 2005. — Tim Fish

Grampa's long beard was serving as a bookmark in a well-thumbed paperback with a Western-themed cover. I never knew what would catch Grampa's fancy in the book department. He was as likely to be caught reading a gothic romantic suspense as he was a snowblower repair manual. — Jessie Crockett

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

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. — John Updike

When other girls had tea parties on the playground, I brought out my secondhand Ouija board and attempted to raise the dead. While my classmates gave book reports on The Wind In The Willows or Charlotte's Web, I did mine on tattered, paperback copies of Stephen King novels that I'd borrowed from my grandmother. Instead of Sweet Valley High, I read books about zombies and vampires. Eventually, my third grade teacher called my mother in to discuss her growing concerns over my behavior, and my mom nodded blithely, but failed to see what the problem was. When Mrs. Johnson handed her my recent book report on Pet Sematary,, my mom wrinkled her forehead with concern and disapproval. "Oh, I see,"she said disappointingly, as she turned to me. "You spelled 'cemetery' wrong." Then I explained that Stephen King had spelled it that way on purpose, and she nodded, saying, "Ah. Well, good enough for me. — Jenny Lawson

How many times have you said, 'This is it. I've finally found my one true love'? And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune. For most people, the process of finding the perfect partner is one trial and error: breakups, makeups, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing - the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture - can make love shatter, stall or fade away. — Haruki Murakami

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. — Christine Quinn

You found your God in a paperback,
You get your history from the Union Jack. — Oasis

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. — Robert Nozick

I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea. — William Peter Blatty

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'm a...paperback, write-in-the-margins kind of girl. — Jay Asher

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page. — Jane Hamilton

Here's the deal. Willi's bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It's a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally — Dan Simmons

Her guardian sighed and looked back down at his book. "I can't tell you how much I look forward to these mature and scintillating conversations. Still, when the old Ari pays a visit, let me know."
"Old Ari? I was sarcastic to you before."
"True." He nodded, turning the page on the paperback. "But there was this era bewteen scared, sarcastic Ari and this new-fangled five year old Ari where you were actually a decent person to be around."
Ouch. "Bite me."
Jai grinned slyly and looked up at her from under his lashes. "Just tell me how hard. — Samantha Young

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. — Kevin O'Leary

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

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 only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore. — Larry McMurtry

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

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

Forgiveness is capital 'L' Love in action. Until you have to forgive someone, you haven't loved. You just think you have. Until somebody forgives you, you don't know humility. [p342, 1st paperback edition] — Rea Nolan Martin

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

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

I have just published a revised version of my book for Kindle and it will be available soon. When it is, I will make a formal announcement. The story is the same but without the noticeable errors. The revised paperback is already available, Thank you for your patience and thanks to all who are reading "A Woman Of Courage. — Eshelle Butler

A reader of The Unspeakables recently contacted me. She said she had become so engrossed with the paperback she'd taken it to the top of a Munro whilst climbing on the Isle of Mull. I'm delighted to have three-dimensional circulation as well. — Peter F. Jemison

Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'. — Andrew Wilson

If I could read your mind, what a tale your thoughts could tell. Just like a paperback novel, the kind that drugstores sell. — Gordon Lightfoot

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

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree. — Adam Ross

[D]on't ever apologise to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologise to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read ... — Neil Gaiman

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

Paperback and buckram books decorated the floor, torn open to leave loose pages lying about like the useless guts of an eviscerated animal. Fury smoldered deep down inside my stomach, as if I were looking at heaps of dead children lying about the room instead. Books were my children. It was sacrilegious. Hundreds — Shayne Silvers

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

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

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. — Russell Smith

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels. — John Sladek

If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box - no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine. — Gabrielle Zevin

He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback. — Louise Erdrich

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

When you buy a jacket, it's important the pockets are big enough for a paperback! — Daniel Pennac

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

Of all the forms in which ideas are disseminated, the college professor lecturing his class is the slowest and the most expensive. You don't have to go to college to learn about the great ideas of Western man. If you want to learn about Milton, or Camus, or even Margaret Mead, you can find them. In paperback. In the library. — Caroline Bird

I know this sounds like quite a pile. I know, too, that some of you will wonder why I don't just buy a Kindle. I see your point, but the trouble is that to do so would be to forgo the pleasure of the moment when, years in the future, sand falls from the pages of an old book, and you suddenly remember the Isle of Wight and A Passage to India, a Greek island and The Map of Love, or whatever. For me, a ghostly trace of Ambre Solaire rising from the pages of a sun-bleached paperback is a way back to the past: to favourite stories as much as to favourite beaches. — Rachel Cooke

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

Books might be your passion but you can't fuck a paperback. — Alexandra Potter

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback. — William Golding

Rip her dress off!" Bob shouted. Bob the Skull takes paperback romances very seriously. The next page turned so quickly that he tore the paper a little. Bob is even harder on books than I am.
"That's what I'm talking about!" Bob hollered, as more pages turned. — Jim Butcher

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

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

You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels. — Heather O'Neill

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

When I was fifteen or sixteen I carried around in the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's 'Republic', front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. How much I wanted an older person to notice me carrying it and be impressed, to pat me on the shoulder and say... I didn't know what exactly.

from: 'The Examined Life, Philosophical Meditations — Robert Nozick

'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. — Ann Leckie

On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives — Bill Bryson

The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive. — Walter Jon Williams

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION How much work did you do today that you will be proud of tomorrow? I don't mean just how you handled the big things, but also how you addressed the little, seemingly insignificant ones. Did you make progress on what matters most to you, or did you allow the buzz, busyness, and expectations of others to squelch your passion and focus? I've been asking these questions of others and myself each day for more than a decade, and they are the main reason I originally felt compelled to write Die Empty. Through my work I've encountered many teams of brilliant, sharp, amazing, talented people who have at some point "settled in" or begun coasting on past success. Unfortunately, — Todd Henry

So, as I wrote in the paperback edition of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, I started telling anyone who asked "Is God in cyberspace?" that the answer is "no" - but He wants to be there. But only we can bring Him there by how we act there. God celebrates a universe with such human freedom because He knows that the only way He is truly manifest in the world is not if He intervenes but if we all choose sanctity and morality in an environment where we are free to choose anything. As Rabbi Marx put it, "In the postbiblical Jewish view of the world, you cannot be moral unless you are totally free. If you are not free, you are really not empowered, and if you are not empowered the choices that you make are not entirely your own. What God says about cyberspace is that you are really free there, and I hope you make the right choices, because if you do I will be present." The — Thomas L. Friedman

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

It's a cinch that if you read it in an occult periodical or paperback, everyone's doing it. That should be your cue to avoid such stuff, lest you be relegated to the same readership level. — Anton Szandor LaVey

She wears only black-rimmed glasses, and is holding a paperback titled Murder and Mayhem in Goose Pimple Junction. Her light — Dennis Hart

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

Maybe faith was never meant to be some perfectly plotted, passion-driven paperback. Maybe faith is the long story of a happy marriage -- an average life made fuller, not smaller, by the pockets of silence and darkness that break into it. — Addie Zierman

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. — Steve Jobs

I need a job and I want to be a paperback writer... — The Beatles

I guess I could be singing about Superman, or about Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, but in my mind I was singing about Julian Assange. I wish I could say that Nietzsche inspired my lyrics but all I can honestly say is I was inspired by the graphic design of these '70s paperback covers for Beyond Good & Evil and The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science. — Dean Wareham

Out of habit, she stopped by the bookshelf in the living room to see if there was a paperback that she could stuff into her pocket for emergencies - you never knew when you might need a book to entertain and comfort and distract you in the day's empty places — Emily Croy Barker

For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book's inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation. — Nevada Barr

You could buy my book in a paperback edition for a dollar, and in hard covers for $3.50. And for fifty cents extra, I come around to your house personally and wet your finger while you're turning the pages. — Bob Hope

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

Even a paperback printed on acidic paper, whose pages have yellowed ten years on, can still be read, no matter how badly the spine is cracked or how inflated it's become from being dropped in the bathtub. The pages might separate from the spine, but a rubber band can keep them together. You may loan a book to your circle of closest friends, but shoes are another matter. A great book will never go out of style - books go with every outfit. — Lewis Buzbee

Books on their own aren't insanely expensive compared to other things; three large cappuccinos cost more than a paperback, and two and a half gallons of gas cost more than a paperback. — M.J. Rose

The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket. — Adrian McKinty

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline. — Louis L'Amour

Learning is available at the library for free; under a tree with a dog-eared paperback; at a job with a boss who gives you responsibility and mentorship; while traveling; while leading a cause, movement, or charity; while writing a novel or composing a poem or crafting a song; while interning, apprenticing, or volunteering; while playing a sport or immersing yourself in a language; while starting a business; and now, while watching a TED talk or taking a Khan Academy class ... — Michael Ellsberg

Spend 80 percent of your time on books and 20 percent on articles and newspapers. And by books, I don't mean just any book. I mean hardcovers. A paperback is made to be read. A hardcover is made to be studied. There's a huge difference. — Tim Sanders

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

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

Earlier in her career, she illustrated the first paperback covers for the entire Black Stallion series, as well as — Jean Slaughter Doty

I'm more excited than I'll admit when my hand closes around the paperback. It's like I've been handed a secret, a piece of her soul that she just decided to entrust with me. That's the way with writers--every word on a page like a window into their private place, exposing a great deal of vulnerability when they allow others to see inside. Even fiction is made up of the truthful scars of the people telling the story. I should know. I tell the same stories myself every day. — Amy Matayo

The e-reading revolution may have reached our shores this year but it has yet to reckon with Australia's summer holidays. Intense sunlight plays havoc with screens and the sand invades every nook and cranny, so as convenient and sexy as your new iPad may be, the battered paperback, its pages pocked and swollen from contact with briny hands, will likely remain the beach format of choice for a few years yet. — Geordie Williamson

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

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

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. — Helene Cixous

The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages. — Don DeLillo

Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and reread until the cover was falling apart. There had been an all-black cover on the vampire book. This new one gleamed like polished chrome. It was called THE SHINING, but it cost $2.50 and he had spent all but $1.25 of his weekly allowance on some STAR WARS stuff at the mall. — C. Dean Andersson

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 Bolano

You don't understand," getting mad. "You guys, you're like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you're looking for, but - " a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head - "in here. That's what I'm for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barrier around an actor's memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also. — Thomas Pynchon

Their happiness was the kind which is fashioned of the comfortable disorder of sauvignon bottles and coffee cups in the sink, paperback thrillers with split spines on the nightstand, bathrobes hung haphazard on high-backed, brocade-seated chairs, shutters left open all night, and the hallway ever in need of new paint. — Catherynne M Valente

Foreword by Major-General (Retired) Richard Rohmer Preface to the Fourth Paperback Edition Preface to the Third Paperback Edition Preface to the Second Paperback Edition Preface to the First Edition — Palmiro Campagna

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

Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Terry Brooks

I often get asked, 'Is the book dead?' It hasn't happened yet. It's different than music. Music was always meant to be pure sound - it started out as pure sound and now it's pure sound again. But books started out as things. Words on paper began as words on paper. The paperback book is the best technology to deliver that information to you. — Chip Kidd

And out of the blue, I got a call from an editor friend at Knopf and she said that they were interested in putting out an update for their vintage paperback line. So I was more than thrilled and it was suggested that perhaps I could do a 1,000 word new introduction covering what's happened with the whole Warhol thing since 1990 when the first edition hardcover came out and, uh, that was about August 1st and I sat down at my computer here in East Hampton and on on August 30th I'd written almost 10,000 words! — Bob Colacello

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