Top 78 Paperback Quotes & Sayings

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.

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.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

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

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.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 write a kind of surreal fantasy, but they can't put 'surreal fantasy' on a paperback.

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.

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!

When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of 'Henderson the Rain King' in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had - a pair of cords and a sport coat - but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits.

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

'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.

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.

When you buy a jacket, it’s important the pockets are big enough for a paperback!

The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Books are easy to find and easy to buy. A paperback these days only costs six or seven dollars. You can borrow that from your kids!

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

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.

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.

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.

Now the look of the book dictates the sale. In my day you could still buy a good cookbook in paperback with no pictures at all. I doubt if that would sell today. But those books were much used: they lived in the kitchen and got splattered with custard and gravy.

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.

I've read enough dreary campus novels to know more than I ever wanted to about the punctured Oxbridge academic psyche, and feel as if I've been through a mid-life crisis dozens of times, purely because I've foolishly grabbed a paperback by an author I've vaguely heard of.

Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them started, maybe. And even if it didn't, at least they'd own that one. So that's a serious problem.

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.'

The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.

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.

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.

This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.

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

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.

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

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.