Paul Collins Quotes

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

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 This is a variation on that twee little fable t...

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

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?

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.

William pondered what his next discovery might be. He knew that readers were vexed by the possibility that their Bard might have been Catholic. There is, after all, that suspicious reference to Purgat...

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. Ther...

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...

I noticed you made a bee-line for their bookcases. It is the oldest and most incorrigible trait of the book-lover.

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.

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...

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.

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

Even the few streets with unobstructed brick sidewalks were comically narrow—just wide enough, as one chronicler put it, to accommodate two lean men to walk abreast or one fat man alone.

…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.

Used

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 speci...

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 bi...

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.

I been brought up a hatter, he sighed, people would have come into the world without heads.