Quotes About Potboilers

#1. When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.

Michael Dirda

#2. Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#3. [T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.

Stephen Jay Gould

#4. An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#5. War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#6. Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#7. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people - Scientology for scholarly seniors.

Robin Sloan

#8. As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy.

Frederick Forsyth

#9. Nothing scares me. I'll do anything.

Anthony Dirrell

#10. You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

Arthur Miller

#11. People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.

Vincent Van Gogh