Bookshops Quotes

A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell. ~ David Mitchell

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn't known I wanted. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

It's the same with books, you see mounds of them in bookshops and you want to read them all, or at least to have a taste of them. You think you could be missing out on something important, you see them and they intrigue you, they tempt you, they tell you how insignificant your life is and how tremendous it could be. ~ Andres Neuman

Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery. ~ Colum McCann

Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works. ~ Kate Williams

As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is reading. No one chastises us for our choice. No one says, 'That's too short for you to read.' No one says, 'That's too easy for you, put it back.' No one says 'You couldn't read that if you tried
it's much too difficult.'
Yet if we take a peek into classrooms, libraries, and bookshops we will notice that children's choices are often mocked, censured, and denied as valid by idiotic, interfering teachers, librarians, and parents. Choice is a personal matter that changes with experience, changes with mood, and changes with need. We should let it be. ~ Mem Fox

Archie says books are our best lovers and our most provoking friends. ~ Stephanie Butland

When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it. ~ Antony Beevor

I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blond's 'Lord Malquist and Mr Moon' sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela - a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles' bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops. ~ Tom Stoppard

I was brought up in a home where I saw my parents read and I was taken to bookshops and libraries, so I grew up feeling very comfortable around books. Also, Ireland is a country which has honoured its writers and poets, so when someone says they wanted to be a writer, its not mocked or looked down upon. ~ Michael Scott

I'm grateful that I've enjoyed the support of libraries, bookshops and institutional funders. ~ Sara Sheridan

And if I had a bookshop of my own? Well, it wouldn't make any money. So I am no help to anyone. But I would set it somewhere with a garden, where light poured in through the windows. Sit in the sun, I'd tell my customers. Open this book. Try it. It won't do any harm, after all, to sit a while and read. ~ Jen Campbell

I've never seen an 'English' books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors. ~ Sara Sheridan

Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures. ~ Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Our lives are becoming more convenient but less tangible, and bookshops are the victims of that choice. ~ Tracy Chevalier

Bookshops are
time machines
spaceships
story-makers
secret-keepers
dragon-tamers
dream-catchers
fact-finders
& safe places.
(this book is for those who know this to be true) ~ Jen Campbell

Free people write books," it said. "Free people publish books. Free people sell books. Free people buy books. Free people read books. In the spirit of America's commitment to free expression we inform the public that this book will be available to readers at bookshops and libraries throughout the country. ~ Salman Rushdie

Heartache may be bad for the soul, but it's great for bookshops. It's when we are at our lowest romantic ebb that we are likely to do the bulk of our life's reading. Adolescents who can't get a date are in a uniquely privileged position: they will have the perfect chance to get grounding in world literature. There is perhaps an important connection between love and reading, there is perhaps a comparable pleasure offered by both.

A feeling of connection may be at the root of it. There are books that speak to us, no less eloquently - but more reliably - than our lovers. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the human species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena may be conveyed on a page in a way that affords us with a sense of self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we are like two lovers on an early dinner date thrilled to discover how much they share (and unable to touch much of the seafood linguine in front of them, so busy are they fathoming the eyes opposite), we may place the book down for a second and stare at its spine with a wry smile, as if to say, "How lucky I ran into you. ~ Alain De Botton

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there's an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain. ~ Lewis Buzbee

I have restaurants, bookshops ... but it's not an empire, more ... a puzzle. If it were an empire, all my restaurants would be the same. ~ Alain Ducasse

I think that most people go to bookshops and have no idea what they want to buy. Somehow the books sit there, almost magically willing people to pick them up. The right person for the right book. Its as though they know whose life they need to be a part of, how they can make a difference, how they can teach a lesson, put a smile on a face at just the right time. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Read enough books. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop ... You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh! ~ Stephen Fry

I still think that going in on that Friday afternoon and spending that money was one of the happiest experiences of my life. ~ Jen Campbell

The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon
Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already
lounged across the table, pushing a fourpenny packet of Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb. ~ George Orwell

I've stolen books. They're the only thing worth taking that don't belong to you. ~ Sully Tarnish

So, what do you go for in a girl?"
He crows, lifting a lager to his lips
Gestures where his mate sits
Downs his glass
"He prefers tits I prefer ass. What do you go for in a girl?"
I don't feel comfortable
The air left the room a long time ago
All eyes are on me
Well, if you must know I want a girl who reads
Yeah. Reads.
I'm not trying to call you a chauvinist
Cos I know you're not alone in this but…
I want a girl who reads
Who needs the written word & uses the added vocabulary
She gleans from novels and poetry
To hold lively conversation In a range of social situations
I want a girl who reads
Who's heart bleeds at the words of Graham Greene Or even Heat magazine
Who'll tie back her hair while reading Jane Eyre
And goes cover to cover with each water stones three for two offer but
I want a girl who doesn't stop there
I want a girl who reads
Who feeds her addiction for fiction
With unusual poems and plays
That she hunts out in crooked bookshops for days and days and days
She'll sit addicted at breakfast, soaking up the back of the cornflakes box
And the information she gets from what she reads makes her a total fox
Cos she's interesting & unique & her theories make me go weak at the knees
I want a girl who reads
A girl who's eyes will analyze
The menu over dinner
Who'll use what she learn ~ Mark Grist

I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling. ~ Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on. ~ James E. Burke

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun. ~ J.K. Rowling

You see, bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places. ~ Jen Campbell

CD stores have the disadvantage of an expensive inventory, but digital bookshops would need no such thing: they could write copies at the time of sale on to memory sticks, and sell you one if you forgot your own. ~ Richard Stallman

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries. ~ Charles Stross

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me. ~ Ben Hecht

Some people say the book is dying but I disagree. Bookshops might be on the way out, but not the book itself. As long as there are people there's always market for a good story. Do you read?'
'Does Vogue, Heat, Attitude, The Gay Times and Hello! count? ~ Dean Cole

I remember a time when bookshops smelled of books and not coffee. ~ David Llewellyn

I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening ... like a light in the midst of the darkness. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

Bookshops are at the coalface of our industry. ~ Sara Sheridan

That bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers. ~ Matthew Pearl

We've always used stories as a way to pass on our history, as a way to explain things in life that we don't understand. We use them to make us feel connected to everything around us, and to help us escape to another time or place.
Bookshops across the world are full of these stories.
From travelling booksellers and undercover bookshops, to pop-up stalls and community hubs, walking into a good bookshop is like walking into another zone.These places are time machines, spaceships, story-makers, secret-keepers. They are dragon-tamers, dream-catchers, fact-finders and safe places. They are full of infinite possibilities, and tales worth taking home.
Because whether we're in the middle of the desert or in the heart of a city, on the top of a mountain or on an underground train: having good stories to keep us company can mean the whole world. ~ Jen Campbell

Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied. ~ Mark Billingham

Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts. ~ Jo Walton

Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it, thanks. I'll eat it here. ~ Frederick Busch

I spend some time every week in independent bookshops all over the country and what I see is inspiring! ~ Sara Sheridan

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. ~ William Gibson

Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive. ~ Jen Campbell

They are a brilliant device for shape-shifting as we can slip into the skin of authors from other times, other cultural backgrounds, brilliant minds who give us a new perspective on life and the world - something we all need from time to time. - Cornelia Funke ~ Jen Campbell

I part-own a bookshop for some strange coincidence of reasons, and it is one of the best things I part-own in my life, or own in my life. I do not know, it just feels great. ~ Lily Cole

We are the leading telugu online bookstore and telugu online bookshops in Hyderabad. We have great author books and Telugu Novels online. We offer the online Books purchase and best online bookshopping in Hyderabad ~ Vividhabooks

If I wasn't an actress, I'd like to cook. I'm pretty obsessed by it. Rome was great in that sense, going to amazing cookery bookshops. No wonder their food is good because the quality and wide range of their produce is so good. It's not fair, really. ~ Polly Walker

My adrenaline started pumping anytime I was within a hundred yards of a bookshop. I loved books nearly as much as I loved clothes. And that's saying something. The feel of them and the smell of them. A bookshop was like like an Aladdin's Cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look. ~ Hilma Wolitzer

A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. [Noël] France was the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat and waste a little time between sales. Nowadays books are bought standing. A request for a book and the naming of the price: that is the sort of transaction to which the all-devouring activity of modern trade has reduced bookselling, which used to be a matter for dawdling, idling, and chatty, friendly browsing. ~ Jules De Goncourt

Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters. ~ Larry McMurtry

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet? ~ Charles Stross

There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane. ~ Mark Haddon

And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides--no matter what Brent Council may claim--an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: 'Giving the people what they didn't know they wanted.' Important category. ~ Zadie Smith

There was also something about the smell of bookshops that was strangely comforting to her. She wondered if it was the scent of ink and paper, or the perfume of binding, string, and glue. Maybe it was the scent of knowledge. Information. Thoughts and ideas. Poetry and love. All of it bound into one perfect, calm place. ~ Alyson Richman

Despite the promise of four days of sun and overly sweet wine, Richard was sporting a sour puss. But then that was to be expected - he sold books for a living, after all. ~ Charlie Hill

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? ~ Hilary Mantel

Who wouldn't want to get married in a room full of love stories? ~ Jen Campbell

If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn't hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop. ~ Francis Spufford

Second hand bookshops are best visited alone and in the rain. ~ Christopher Fowler

I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science. ~ Heinz R. Pagels

Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky secondhand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it. ~ Terry Pratchett

A book can become your best companion in times of crisis.
Not only do you learn in the journey of your pages, but rediscover yourself, with your virtues and defects ... often makes you question everything, even life itself.
The books are fantastic, as they not only transport you to other places and the awakening of sensations, curiosity, laughter, hilarity, sadness, etc. Other times, it can give you a quiet space in truculent moments, and lead you to a level of peace, acceptance, healthy optimism, that I will never tire of recommending it.
Never stop reading, there are no excuses ... there are always some minutes in any place, at any time and a huge universe for all tastes !!! ~ Elizabeth Hay

I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization. ~ Jerry Pinto

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called 'one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly'. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. 'I read the newspapers because they're mostly trash,' he said in 1936. 'Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.' Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54

'As a general rule,' Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, 'I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.' Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as 'heavy-going', with 'such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes'. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster's A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the 'perfect relaxation' provided by those 'unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers', Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wod ~ Richard Davenport-Hines

The trouble with bookshops is that they are as bad as pubs. You start at one and then you drift to another, and before you know where you are you are on a gigantic book-binge. My brief case was full to bursting and I had bundles of books under both arms. I was bowed down by the weight of them. ~ R.T. Campbell

This is not like other bookshops.' He leaned forward and whispered. 'Every word in that book is true. Every word on every page in every book in my shop is true. ~ E.H. Munro

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents in the school holidays, and the only books in the house were a copy of the Bible and Agatha Christie's 'Murder at the Vicarage.' I developed a taste for murder mysteries and then later discovered libraries, second-hand bookshops, and jumble sales. ~ Val McDermid

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul. ~ Christopher Morley

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. ~ Terry Pratchett

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers
booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one
the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it
along with first dibs on the new books. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops. ~ Hari Kunzru

This diversity of social and semi-governmental institutions and organizations gives us not merely an insight into the immense complexity of an urban society, but also an inkling of the huge efforts and even violence required if they are to be disciplined, levelled down and made uniform. We come to realize all the things that must be done to ensure that the hundreds of newspapers and magazines follow the same linguistic line, the theatre repertoires are made to conform, and the libraries and bookshops are purged of the works of writers who have not kept up with the times. What must happen to ensure that museums, whose exhibitions and displays necessarily reflect long-term efforts, accept the inevitability of a new line and a new course? And what must be done to ensure that hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren feel ready to accept a new canon ~ Karl Schlogel

Because whether we're in the middle of the desert or in the heart of a city, or the top of a mountain or on an underground train: having good stories to keep us company means the whole world. ~ Jen Campbell

If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is. ~ Gary Hume

I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life. ~ Sarah Hall

Bookseller: Can I help at all?
customer: Yes, where's your fiction section?
bookseller: It starts over on the far wall. Are you looking for anything in particular?
customer: Yes, any books by Stefan Browning.
bookseller: I'm not familiar with him, what kind of books has he written?
customer: I don't know if he's written any. You see, my name's Stefan Browning, and I always like to go into
bookshops to see if anyone with my name has written a book.
bookseller: ... right.
customer: Because then I can buy it, you see, and carry it around with me and tell everyone that I've had a novel published.Then everyone will think I'm really cool, don't you think? ~ Jen Campbell

It's actually as simple as this. New authors, building their customer base, need physical bookshops. Physical bookshops are lovely tactile, friendly, expert, welcoming places. Physical books, which can only be seen and handled in physical bookshops, are lovely, tactile things. Destroy those bookshops, and the very commercial and cultural base to the book industry is destroyed. Once and for all. Like Humpty Dumpty, it can never be put together again. ~ Tim Waterstone

When you buy a book at a reasonable price, you buy a new perspective on life, and such a new perspective is priceless because it can open many doors previously closed to you! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration. ~ Sarah Hall