Paul Collins > Quotes

“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

“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, Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism

“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, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“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, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“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, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“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, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

“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, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“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

“When Jules Verne was on everyone’s nightstand, Pulitzer ordered daredevil reporter Nellie Bly to travel around the world in eighty days; she accomplished it in seventy-two.”
― Paul Collins, The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars

“At five that morning, Edgar Allan Poe met the fate anticipated in his poem “To Annie”: Thank Heaven! the crisis— The danger is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last— And the Fever called ‘Living’ Is conquer’d at last.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“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, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“Such madness was strictly prohibited in New York, but not in New Jersey.”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“On the morning of his funeral, the Baltimore Sun failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“The assembly proceeded to the new grave that would come to serve as a burial place for Edgar, Virginia, and Aunt Maria, reuniting the peculiar household that been Poe’s sorrow and solace in life. There they read aloud his final poem, “Annabel Lee”—and in its last lines, the farewell of an artist finally at rest: And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument,” Doyle later mused, “it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his “prose poem,” Eureka. “The Raven” was indeed Poe’s most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms—but as art it is distinctly backward-looking.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“Whether the world at large recognized him or his work, something had changed inside the shifting identity of the fugitive Edgar Allan Poe—something irrevocable. He was an author now.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called “tales of ratiocination”—his own name for detective stories—Poe later remarked, “People think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“…I had a good title already. My book was originally called Loser: A Brief History of Notable Failures. But American publishers don’t like this. Losing is a bad thing in our country. It’s not allowed.”
― Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“You see, literary culture is perpetually dead and dying; and when some respected writer discovers and loudly proclaims the finality of this fact, it is a forensic marker of their own decomposition. It means that they have artistically expired within the last ten years, and that they will corporeally expire within the next twenty.”
― Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“THE YOUNG carpenter miserably regarded his fellow inmates. Some had been confined for so long that nobody even knew why they were there anymore. One wild-looking blind and insane man known as “Paul from New Jersey” snored quietly on the floor, with only a block of wood as his pillow. When awake, he wandered around naked and filthy. An appalled visitor, asking why the man had been left naked, found the staff unconcerned: “The keeper explained that when furnished with a shirt, the rats soon eat it off.”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“And yet something unsettling remained about the notion of John Pastano as a willful murderer: the recollection, perhaps, that after murdering Mary Castro, he had filled his hat with her blood and wandered out into the street with it. When he was collared over by the Tea-Water Pump, broken English had spilled out from the man. “Why you catch me?” he asked innocently. “Me not do”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“But this much is known: Hamilton shot into the trees. Burr, leveling his pistol at his foe, did not.”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“Napoléon Bonaparte. The new leader had no immediate fight to pick with America; some thought he might actually bring peace to Europe. Hamilton’s endless demands for more funding and troops were beginning to look foolish.”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads.”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“For more fortunate readers, it reminded them that “the action of the clytoris in women is like that of a penis to man,” and the key to “brifk and vigorous” enjoyments—especially with “cares and thoughts of business drowned in a glafs of rofy wine.”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“Much of Hamilton’s previous two years had been spent building up an “additional army,” justified by stoking fears of a French invasion of godless radicals. That country’s revolution, Hamilton warned, exposed America to a veritable “volcano of atheism, depravity, and absurdity … an engine of despotism and slavery.”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“Back then, Manhattan was the infant country”
― Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

“It really is an APPALLING thing to think of the people who have no books...It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater part of humanity that is the common lot. We may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two branches - those who read books and those who do not.”
― Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books