Weekend Words: Paper
A new exhibition at the Grolier Club in Manhattan celebrates 500 years of the paperback book with a tribute to the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1455–1515), who was the first to create books in a portable format.
A new exhibition at the Grolier Club in Manhattan celebrates 500 years of the paperback book with a tribute to the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1455–1515), who was the first to create books in a portable format.
A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
—Samuel Goldwyn
The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
—Pablo Picasso
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
—William Faulkner
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.
—Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (Los Angeles)
The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.
—Eldridge Cleaver
The atom bomb is a paper tiger which United States reactionaries use to scare people.
—Mao Tse-Ting, interview 1946
Blest paper-credit! last and best supply!
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!
—Alexander Pope
Even a broken heart doesn’t warrant a waste of good paper.
—Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book — it makes a very poor doorstop.
—Alfred Hitchcock
