Newsstands Quotes

I didn't set out to be a singer. Actually, the earliest creative efforts I made were drawings copied from comics we got every week at the newsagent, or rearranging photos I cut out and pasted in scrapbooks.

Growing up, the news agents round my way in Kilburn all had 'Time Out' on their shopfronts. The logo is a London icon.

My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.

I would go to newsstands and buy paperbacks they were selling for tourists, usually bestsellers and mass market paperbacks. In the beginning, it was like going to the Rosetta Stone--I didn?t understand anything, I'd get a headache--but I began to figure it out, and I'd read a lot of Stephen King paperbacks. I've always said he was my English professor.

For heaven's sakes, in the newspaper days, when we had competing newspapers, and the newsstands sale was as important as the circulation - as the agreed-upon circulation, whatever you call that - in those days, why, gosh, the sensationalism was tremendous.

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.

The 'Fortune' I came to work for on Jan. 25, 1954, was a monthly, with pages significantly larger than what you're reading; 'art' covers that did not relate to stories inside; and a newsstand price of $1.25.

I never buy magazines, I never even buy books.

Newspapers are a surprisingly good business in a country (Saudi Arabia) where the truth is so carefully guarded. Members of the royal family, Al Saud, are obsessively concerned about their image; they own or control most of the Saudi press, which dominates the Arab world. Within the kingdom, there are more than a dozen papers on the newsstands every morning. The most authoritative of them, and the most progressive, … are owned by Saudi princes but published in London. They are constrained by the same taboos that cripple all Saudi publications, however: nothing provocative can be said about Islam, the kingdom’s official religion; the government, which is effectively led by Crown Prince Abdullah; or the royal family, which is headed by King Fahd.