Bookstores Quotes

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

He didn't expect that question to send her tripping over her own two feet and flying into the bookstore's erotica section he'd followed her to. Luckily he had fast hands and caught her before her head could make contact with the Kama Sutra. ~ Shelly Laurenston

Think before you speak. Read before you think. ~ Fran Lebowitz

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in. ~ Elliot Perlman

Genres do exist because frequent users of any large bookstore can instantly tell what any piece of fiction is supposed to be about by its title, its cover and its location in the shop. ~ John Clute

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice. ~ Dave Gibbons

PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages. ~ M.J. Rose

Just handling this ocean of different books - new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten - it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it's just very liberating to break out of a great man's theory of history.
I guess I've always liked working from that sense of - what would you call it? - license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Finding unscented candles was another challenge he never thought he'd have to face. Colors were fine, colors could be useful as elements in various spells. But since meeting Amelia, he'd spent way too much time standing in front of walls of candles labeled with names like "Cranberry Spice" and "Warm Honey." Christian bookstores and other religious supply shops became their go-to spots to find simple, unadorned, non-scented votive candles. Another deep irony, he observed. If only those kind, wide-eyed women at the cash registers knew what those candles were being used for. ~ Carrie Vaughn

These days, it seems like you can't throw a fish in a bookstore without hitting a high-stakes love triangle
not that I recommend the throwing of fish in bookstores, mind you, as it certainly annoys the booksellers, not to mention the fish ... ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store. ~ Salman Rushdie

I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

If I see Marian Keyes' books or Patricia Scanlan's books given more prominence than mine in the bookstore, I'll move mine to the front. I've told them I do this, and they've confessed to doing the same thing to me. ~ Maeve Binchy

As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for. ~ Paul Krugman

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

My bookstore obsession grew to the point where I'd search for new shops during family trips, as though that were the reason for our travel. ~ Lewis Buzbee

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it. ~ Roger Ebert

My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. ~ Sally Mann

I was once almost forced off the stage at a large chain bookstore that shall remain nameless, because she introduced me as Lemony Snicket, and I immediately interrupted her and said, "Oh no, Lemony Snicket isn't here," and then she tried to cancel the event right then and there. ~ Daniel Handler

I wouldn't have a career if it weren't for independent bookstores. ~ John Green

Here is the treasure chest of the world - the public library, or a bookstore. ~ Ben Carson

I'm a good person. I eat pretty well. I work out. I go to bookstores. I save people. For a living. I have better things to do than get hauled in for a medical checkup every week. Have I complained the last few months? Constantly. Was I a good patient? No. What can I say? When your primary care provider is a shadowy government agency, you have to be your own medical advocate. ~ Chelsea Cain

The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film. ~ Barbara Kruger

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight. ~ William S. Burroughs

So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing
in my collection and others
in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music
vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison
room as brain
is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had "just always been placed there." The longer he pondered booksellers' indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. "Thinking about it made me angry," Josephy wrote in his autobiography, "and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult. ~ Bobby Bridger

If I'm in the bookstore, and I see a 700-page novel, my first thought is, 'Ooh, how could you cut this down to size and make a movie out of it?' ~ Brian Helgeland

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores. ~ Jo Nesbo

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us. ~ Luca Turin (Author) Tania Sanchez (Author)

Ralph Nader choose the man with whom to share the responsibility of running a distant third, California activist Peter Camejo. You may remember that Camejo ran for president in 1976 on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Actually, you might only remember that if you run a lesbian, vegetarian, bookstore. ~ Jon Stewart

In those days, there was no money to buy books. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; Neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged. ~ Lewis Buzbee

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square. ~ Gloria Steinem

For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon. ~ Lewis Buzbee

The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges. ~ Nancy Byrd Turner

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries. ~ Douglas Brinkley

I myself don't know what makes my books work. I enter a bookstore and I'm frankly overwhelmed by the number of books in most of them, and I know people are buying mine. ~ Chetan Bhagat

Here's the truth, simply stated ... bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. Don't believe a single zero of all those editions claimed to be 100,000! 40,000! ... even 400 copies! just for the suckers! Alack! ... Alas! ... only love and romance ... and even then! ... manage to keep selling ... and a few murder mysteries ... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Bookstores are temples and stories are my prayers. ~ Jaye Wells

I like to browse and just hang in bookstores. ~ Pharrell Williams

Hugo headed off toward the door to leave, but the bookstore was warm and quiet, and the teetering piles of books fascinated him. ~ Brian Selznick

The average buyer in bookshop spends 8 seconds on the front cover and 15 seconds on the back cover before deciding whether to purchase the book or not. On average, he does not get past page 18. See? The odds are stacked against us writers! ~ Ashwin Sanghi

I love books and going to bookstores. My favorite sound is the sound of the needle hitting the record. ~ Winona Ryder

Your reciept is your library card.
On what killed the brick and mortar bookstores. ~ Michael P. Naughton

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. ~ Mary Karr

Profitable bookstores sell books. Unprofitable book sellers store books. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy. ~ Louis L'Amour

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores. ~ Lewis Buzbee

I see now that dismissing YA books because you're not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you're not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I've discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that's filled with masterpieces I've never heard of. ~ Nick Hornby

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000. ~ Anthony Burgess

I often think ... that the bookstores that will save civilization are not online, nor on campuses, nor named Borders, Barnes & Noble, Dalton, or Crown. They are the used bookstores, in which, for a couple of hundred dollars, one can still find, with some diligence, the essential books of our culture, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Plato, Augustine, and Pascal. ~ James V. Schall

I had some very, very fond memories of the people I worked with and the authors I worked with - and I won't mention any names - but as I have been traveling through rural Maine over the past few weeks, one of my favorite things to do is to go into bookstores on the side of rural routes and paw through the old copies of Tom Clancy and Trevanian books they have in there for weird old 1970s thrillers that I haven't read yet. ~ John Hodgman

If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. ~ Demetri Martin

I always thought that television was the way to go in my goal to invade pop culture because it got to towns in which there were no bookstores. That's how I used to think of it: How do I reach kids who not only don't read but probably have no access to much in the way of books? ~ Matt Groening

[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel
back in 1980, before I was online
I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.' ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Most used bookstores look like they defeated their owners at some point. Maybe once upon a time, the collection was carefully curated, but eventually fatigue set in and the place was overrun, one dog-eared copy of Cold Sassy Tree at at time. ~ Mary McCoy

Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves. ~ Jesse James Garrett

By the mid 1970s, the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers. ~ Jason Epstein

I sell well now in Russia. I remember one signing in Russia some years ago where the bookstore had two strongmen to hold the crowds back. ~ Robert Sheckley

It's been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica. ~ John Hodgman

From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another. ~ John Updike

They do have these things called bookstores there. I've heard tell that if you give them money, they let you leave with a book. ~ Lauren Morrill

I love bookstores. I love the energy in a bookstore and the smell of the paper. ~ Chris Colfer

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos ... ~ Anne Fadiman

At one time in my career, Barnes and Noble bookstores categorized my books as religious fiction. ~ Richard Paul Evans

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores. ~ Christina Baker Kline

Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team. ~ Yann Martel

It's like so great to be in Toronto and to see everything that's in the books and everything they reference and to be able to hang out in those places and go to those bookstores and those comic book stores and those music stores, and like have that, from the books onto the screen, is so cool and I'm glad to have been part of that. ~ Mary Elizabeth Winstead

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections. ~ Adam Gopnik

Bookstores are a giant present waiting to be unwrapped, full of stories and discoveries and lives. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain. ~ St. Lucia

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

The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore. ~ Larry McMurtry

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. ~ Reed Hastings

I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable. ~ John Green

I've always found old bookstores exciting. Whenever I'm in a city that's new to me, I immedicately look through the telephone directory for BOOKS, USED AND RARE. Book dealers send me their catalogs, and I read them as carefully as I would a letter from an old friend, never knowing what treasure I might find. Sometimes the catalogs contain printed material other than books, such as old photographs, newspapers, pamphlets, postcards, and letters. ~ Walter Dean Myers

My brother trolled recovery and support groups, searching for women with dependency issues, the way I frequented bookstores with the hope of finding a well-adjusted, intelligent woman. Between us, his record was more stellar, his sin more reprehensible; though, knowing my brother, he slept soundly through the night without ever experiencing the slightest remorse. ~ Richard J. O'Brien

I've often wondered where Jesus would apply His hastily made whip if He were to visit our culture. My guess is that it would not be money-changing tables in the temple that would feel His wrath, but the display racks in Christian bookstores. ~ R.C. Sproul

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline. ~ Louis L'Amour

Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they'd be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn't imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores. ~ Michelle Tea

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

Usually when I enter a bookstore, I feel immediately calm. Bookstores are, for me, what churches are for other people. My breath gets slower and deeper as I peruse the shelves. I believe that books contain messages I am meant to receive. I'm not normally superstitious, but I've even had books fall from shelves and land at my feet. Books are my missives from the universe. ~ Laurie Horowitz

The world is full of instructions and advice on how to mother, in bookstores, in academia, on the playgrounds, in the media. Mothers are always examining how they treat their children, but aside from the occasional "Don't talk to your mother that way," or "You shouldn't have listened to your mother," there's not much guidance out there for daughters. ~ Mia Fontaine

Books are to the mind as the whetstone for the knives. ~ Aman Jassal

Because sometimes you just have to dance like a madman in the Self-Help section of your local bookstore. ~ David Levithan

Fischer was a good kid but very unsophisticated about anything but chess. It was all chess for him, every waking moment. We'd go down to the Four Continents bookstore and he'd buy any Russian chess material he could get his hands on. He'd learned enough Russian to get the gist of prose and he just absorbed the chess part. ~ Ronald Gross

Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs. ~ Wendy Beckett

Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn't trust a bookstore, what could you trust? ~ Rachel Cohn

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. ~ John Updike

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

There's nothing definite yet. Of course, any time you have a book, there's going to be book signings and stuff. We'll do bookstores that handle both audio and video. And some of the stores want to have the CDs available at the same time. So that part looks real good. ~ Scotty Moore

I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is a breezy, big-hearted treat, especially if you've ever wondered about the inner workings of America's national treasures
neighborhood bookstores. ~ Jami Attenberg

I can never leave a bookstore without buying a book. I read four or five at a time. ~ Mireille Guiliano

When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life. ~ Mike Greenberg

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. ~ John Updike