78 Booksellers Quotes
Following is our list of booksellers quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
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Famous Booksellers Quotes
Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians". — Charles Stross
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. — Jerry Seinfeld
Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures. — Rodrigo Rey Rosa
A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens. — John Cowper Powys
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. — Walter Benjamin
Standardization, instead of individualization. Cheap books, instead of private press editions. Active literature, instead of passive leather bindings. — Jan Tschichold
I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good. — Kathryn Stockett
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. — Virginia Woolf
If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. — Demetri Martin
Books are humanity in print. — Barbara Tuchman
A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar. — Carolyn Heilbrun
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul. — Neil Gaiman
Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal. — Laura Miller
Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again. — Marsilio Ficino
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
Short Booksellers Quotes
- Your second-hand bookseller is second to none in the worth of the treasures he dispenses. — Leigh Hunt
- The connection between authors, printers, and booksellers must be kept up. — James Boswell
- Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers. — Horace
- Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate. — Horace
- You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller. — John Green
- The booksellers are generous liberal-minded men. — Samuel Johnson
- For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world. — Christopher Smart
- "Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged". — Terry Pratchett
Bookstore Quotes
Think before you speak. Read before you think. — Fran Lebowitz
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose. — George Carlin
There are few professions whose primary objective is to advance the cause of humanity rather than simply to make money or accrue power. Among this limited group of humanitarians I would number teachers, nurses, bookstore owners, and bartenders. — Jack McDevitt
I'd never heard of the 'Lord of the Rings', actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, 'Holy cow, what else am I missing out on?' — Sean Astin
A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader. — Jason Epstein
Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. — Anna Quindlen
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
Books are easy to find and easy to buy. A paperback these days only costs six or seven dollars. You can borrow that from your kids! — Jim Rohn
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me. — Erik Larson
People Writing About Booksellers
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Horace |
926 | 4340 |
 Charles Stross |
120 | 114 |
 Jerry Seinfeld |
282 | 1528 |
 John Cowper Powys |
26 | 202 |
 Walter Benjamin |
143 | 1292 |
 Jan Tschichold |
14 | 860 |
More Booksellers Quotes
I've mis-signed many a book Rollins or Clemens. My readers quickly become aware. Booksellers will often promote me under both names, and I do plug both at signings. Generally, the fantasy reader has no problem going into the suspense genre. It's harder for the typical suspense reader to go the other direction. — James Rollins
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book. — Elizabeth Hand
The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best. — Ray Bradbury
it's a good idea to wait a few months before joining anything when you arrive at a village. A bookseller friend who retired to nearby Oxfordshire, and was worried he might be bored, got himself on to every village committee in the first six months, and spent the next ten years extricating himself. — Jilly Cooper
there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain. — Mary Roberts Rinehart
You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that's the secret weapon of the bookstore - is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers. — John Green
There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon. — Charles Caleb Colton
Millions of people are provided with their thoughts as with their clothes; authors, printers, booksellers, and newsmen stand, in relation to their minds, simply as shoemakers and tailors stand to their bodies. — George Augustus Henry Sala
My readers are as diverse as any group you will ever see. Something that booksellers always tell me. That they are always surprised at the kind of people that come to my readings. That they are such a mix of ages and colors. It looks like people spilling out of an elevator. — Sandra Cisneros
A man's bookseller should keep his confidence, like his physician. What can become of a world where every man knows what another man reads? Why, sir, books would become like quacks' potions, with every mountebank in the newspapers claiming one volume's superiority over another. — P.B. Kerr
Serial killers are everywhere! Well, perhaps not in our neighborhood, but on our television screens, at the movie theatres, and in rows and rows of books at our local Borders or Barnes and Noble Booksellers. — Pat Brown
I love meeting booksellers and readers and hearing how they've read and received my stories. Often I'm surprised by which characters they've loved best, what scenes have stayed with them, what connections they've felt between my characters' lives and theirs. — Julia Glass
I remember Stephen King did a fundraiser one time with J.K. Rowling and he was very impressed with her. But we talk a lot about publishing, bookselling, and book writing. He's been around for ten years longer than me and was a bestseller right off the bat. And he's seen and done everything. It's rare to be with somebody who has been through all of that. — John Grisham
Anybody who puts a book into someone else's hands inspires me - teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents. — Kate DiCamillo
[Mid-list writers are now] less greed on the part of both publishers and chain booksellers. It is easier for them to publish and sell only blockbusters and leave the real work to small presses. — W. P. Kinsella
The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghanistan. There are millions of stories out there, millions of potential Booksellers of Kabul or Valentino Achak Dengs. — Annia Ciezadlo
There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book. — Annia Ciezadlo
Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall. — Henry Ward Beecher
If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book. - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire — Voltaire
I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is. — William Boyd
Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes. — Jonathan Lethem
I am a writer (and one day I'll be an author). For a long time I was a bookseller (who wrote) or a TV producer (who wrote), but for the last decade or so, its been "writer." — Michael Scott
I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader. — Michael Scott
My genre-hopping has caused problems with marketing and sales departments over the years, because they need to know where to position a book with the booksellers. — F. Paul Wilson
The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews. — Edgar Allan Poe
Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers' shelves permit ordinary poets to exist. [Lat., Mediocribus esse poetis Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae.] — Horace
Overall, Id say I was an awesome bookseller, but probably not the best book shelver. I loved recommending books and helping people find books. — Julie Kagawa
I feel like a lot has changed - ebooks are a much more valid format and bigger presses are taking less chances. As a bookseller, there are less real bookstores and more people buying on-line. As a writer, I think there are fewer paths to break through on a big press, but on the other hand there are more small presses doing awesome work now. Overall, artistically, I think it's a pretty exciting time in the literary world. — Kevin Sampsell
I used to think I should like to be a bookbinder or bookseller it seemed to me a most delightful trade and I wished or thought of nothing better. More lately I thought I should be a minister, it seemed so serious and useful a profession, and I entered but little into the merits of religion and the duties of a minister. Every one dissuaded me from the notion, and before I arrived at any age to require a real decision, science had claimed me. — William Stanley Jevons
I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me. — Karl Marlantes
I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations . — Edmund Burke
Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. — Alberto Manguel
I always ask the booksellers to look at me and recommend a book; 9 out of 10, they get it right; it’s usually a book about someone dysfunctional. To me bookstores are like brothels of imagination, each book is luring me over going, 'Read me, read me'. — Ruby Wax
Some of you...have never read a Patrick O'Brian novel. I beseech you to start now. Start with Master and Commander, which should be available in paperback from your nearest bookseller. And if he-or she-does not have a copy, then beat the wretched fellow. — Kevin Myers
The probability of finding a particular book increases in relation to the clarity of the store's focus, the diligence and shrewdness of the bookseller, and the size of the business. — Gabriel Zaid
There is no part of the country where in the summer you cannot get a sufficient supply of the best specimens. Teach your children to bring them in for themselves. Take your text from the brooks, not from the booksellers. — Louis Agassiz
In Conclusion
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