Quotes & Sayings About Best Seller

Windham, but not often. There were no murders in anyone's memory, no rapes or molestations or sudden disappearances. It's a quiet town. Windham was perfect, we thought. Safe and sound, and that's where Veronica and I would grow up. We moved there ten years ago. That was in April 2005. I was nine and my little sister Veronica was almost three. My dad, Dr. Simon Taylor, had made a bunch from the popularity of his book, and it was number four on the best-seller list and still holding fast. I'll bet fifty thousand a month was tumbling in, and Dad had already signed a two million dollar advance on his next book. — Peter Gilboy

The taxi moved forward, carrying with it, the murder that Matt was. — Viveca Benoir

Making the best-seller list is a big deal; it's like being nominated for an Oscar. Hitting No. 1 is like actually winning the award. It's very gratifying. — Brad Thor

Every life is a story make your life a best seller. — Inspirational Sayings

This book is written in
a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance. — Phindiwe Nkosi

Ask yourself, what makes my book so different? So interesting? Don't write to be a best seller. Write for and from your heart, not your wallet. Write something you want to be remembered by. — Leon Nacson

I'm astounded by people who take eighteen years to write something. That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary, and was that ever on the best-seller list? — Sylvester Stallone

There was a red snake of blood symbolizing her life, and its end. — Viveca Benoir

Violence always leads to pain Trendal Malian- Ishtaria: Prince of Blades — Keith Collier

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well. — Daniel J. Boorstin

You cannot replace kindness by cleverness. — Kamon

If you're looking for lollipops and rainbows while you shop for the latest best seller, you best not come to me. I won't chat you up and tell you how cute your kid is. I won't smile and flirt. I won't stroke your ego about the jewelry you are wearing or the shirt you have on. I will help you find what you need. I will recommend books and hell I even talk about what I liked about one book over another but all that other shit is just not my thing. — J.L. Mac

How destiny plays games so thrilling,
both stay in the same building.
His books declared for the best seller of the year,
and she lives in the apartment to his but upstairs.
He is making fame, she has committed suicide severe.


The same window of the tall building instigated,
such varied colors.

In the woman-frustration and fear.
In the man- an inspiration so rare.
They share the same height, same sight,
of the same building.
From which,
one flew like kite and the other down right. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

You can be a member of all of the romance writers associations, take part in all of the networking available, or win the latest romance award ... but guess what? None of that makes a difference if you don't WRITE something people want to READ. The greatest editor in the world won't make your book a best seller if it isn't something people care about. So forget all of the fluff that clouds your purpose ... writing!! — Kathryn Le Veque

Paper is my best friend and paper seller is my worst friend! — Javad Alizadeh

Don't be afraid: you have a best seller on your hands. — Colson Whitehead

Here's the deal. Willi's bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It's a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally — Dan Simmons

Of course I want to be a best seller because I'm in the business and I want to be read, but there is no money in the world that can compensate for writing badly. — David Lagercrantz

The silly antics that would get me in trouble at school have put me on the best-seller list. So I guess the moral here is ignore your teach ... never mind. That's not the moral. Probably. — MaryJanice Davidson

Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house. — Amanda Hocking

The heart aches in brokenness as daylight awakens the pain of knowing. — Phindiwe Nkosi

The anthology was not a best-seller; art as a weapon seldom is. — Lyle W. Dorsett

Even if you are a best-seller you feel insecure because it is all so unpredictable. — Patricia Cornwell

A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller. — Jane Green

One cannot judge by book being best seller. We all know that. Many best sellers are terrible trash. — Philip K. Dick

Sometimes the writer has to learn the hard way of creating a bad work to become a best-seller yet doesn't surrender to the negative where other writers will. — Millicent Ashby

The best thing about doing a signing tour is that numbers become faces. I got to sign books for six or seven thousand people, all of whom were dreadfully nice. Everything else, the interviews, the hotels, the plane travel, the best-seller lists, even the sushi, gets old awfully fast. Well, maybe not the sushi. — Neil Gaiman

Some people get their books on the best-seller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way. — Lorrie Moore

Regardless, God's closet door won't seem to stay shut. Our culture is asking questions, from the latest Amazon best seller denouncing the brutality of God, to the most recent New York Times editorial lamenting the inherent violence of religion, to one of many conversations overheard at the local coffee shop on "why I could just never believe." This conversation is on our culture's lips. — Joshua Ryan Butler

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality. — Rebecca West

Remember where you're standing when the spotlight goes off," Lovell warned me once, when our book was a best-seller and the movie it spawned was in theatres. "You'll have to find your own way off the stage. — Jeffrey Kluger

It's embarrassing ... you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List. — Abbie Hoffman

There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results. KEN BLANCHARD Chief Spiritual Officer of the Ken Blanchard Companies and coauthor of over 30 books, including the classic best seller The One Minute Manager — Jack Canfield

But postal inspectors also solved crimes. James Holbook's Ten Years Among the Mail Bags; or, Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post-Office Department, published in 1855, became a best seller and is thought to have helped inspire the modern detective novel, with its tales of mail robbers and malefactors who tried to use the public mails for nefarious purposes. "A mail bag is an epitome of human life,"' Holbrook wrote in the opening section of his book. "All the elements which go to form the happiness or misery of individuals--the raw material so to speak, of human hopes and fears--here exist in a chaotic state." Someone had to protect it. — Devin Leonard

In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower the bar from "best-seller" to "would not make someone vomit." Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low. — Chris Baty

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days. — Albert Brooks

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail. — James A. Michener

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality. — Tim O'Brien

Like the magnolia tree,
She bends with the wind,
Trials and tribulation may weather her,
Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms,
See her standing there, like steel,
With her roots forever buried,
Deep in her Southern soil. — Nancy B. Brewer

The present moment is the combination of future and past ... so let's live and sometimes, sometimes let's just forget about the rest! — Haidji

Being a writer is a gift, being an author is amazing, becoming a best seller is everyone's dream — LaQuita Cameron

Venom first made his appearance some years ago in a Spider-Man book, and was a huge best-seller. — Peter Milligan

The Apple iPad is not going to be the company's next runaway best seller. Not if the industry can help it ... with the iPad, Apple may have irked its somewhat new partner Intel Corp. Intel gets spanked by nobody. — John C. Dvorak

Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list. — Jerry Pournelle

On the strength of Vonnegut's reputation, 'Breakfast of Champions' spent a year on the best-seller lists, proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money. — Charles J. Shields

WHEN THE ALMIGHTY HAS PREDESTINED YOU, THERE IS NOONE IN THIS PHYSICAL LIFE THAT CAN BLOCK YOUR BLESSINGS ... — Muffin

I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller. It was my first popular book and aroused a great deal of interest. Initially, many people found it difficult to understand. I therefore decided to try to write a new version that would be easier to follow. — Stephen Hawking

She could possibly hit the best-seller list if she sold it as a novel, though. — Shanna Swendson

Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought. — Studs Terkel

At the same time, popular notions of marriage and the home were challenged on other fronts. Utopian communities experimented with radical new forms of marriage or, as in the Oneida Community, did away with it altogether. The Shakers took up celibacy, the Mormons polygamy; and Charles Knowlton issued an underground best-seller on birth control methods. William Alcott, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and scores of other experts countered — Ann Jones

Perhaps that is why we humans are so devoted to animals, because they are not turned off by the outward appearances people so often judge us by.We may love horses for their sheer beauty but I don't think they fall in love with us for ours. Nor do they need to know how much we have achieved or how we rank on a best-seller list. They accept us for who we are. — Susan Richards

In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa. — Daniel J. Boorstin

If you see our best seller list, most of them are books that are given as gifts. They are books you give to flatter somebody. — John Gimlette

I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me. — John Fowles

Facebook draws from the public and public-interest sphere, a simultaneously bold and modest step towards acknowledging that our new networked technologies deeply affect our lives in ways not always captured or best shaped by the typical template of consumer and seller. — Jonathan Zittrain

When you've written 10 books and have six on the New York Times best-seller list - and four have been No. 1 - I think you have a right to be a member of Congress. — Marianne Williamson

Somehow, women's romance novels are not titled He Stopped When I Said "No". They are, though, titled Sweet Savage Love, in which the woman rejects the hand of her gentler lover who saves her from the rapist and marries the man who repeatedly and savagely rapes her. It is this "marry the rapist" theme that not only turned Sweet Savage Love into a best-seller but also into one of women's most enduring romance novels. — Warren Farrell

Before my book, 'California,' came out, I had modest hopes for it. Or, let's put it this way - I had the same hopes that every literary fiction writer in America has: I wanted the novel to be well-received, critically. As for sales? I didn't want it to disappoint, but I didn't expect it to be a best-seller, either. — Edan Lepucki

I started hitting best-seller lists as soon as I stopped using outlines. With Strangers, I started with nothing more than a couple of characters I thought I'd like and with a premise. Nearly every new writer I know uses detailed outlines, and so did I for a long time. But when I stopped relying on them, my work became less stiff, more organic, less predictable. BUT, nearly every beginning writer I've known and some excellent veterans as well, such as Jeffery Deaver, create chapter-by-chapter outlines of considerable length before starting to write the novel. The point of this tip is simply that if you feel constrained by an outline, it isn't the only way to work. — Dean Koontz

My first book was rejected nine times. It turned out to be a best seller, Battle Cry? in 1953. — Leon Uris

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money. — Manuel Puig

I started a deli when I was 19 years old. Kevin O's. The sandwiches at Kevin O's were a little like Subway before Subway - fresh baked bread. My best seller was turkey with cream cheese and artichoke hearts. I just made it up. — Kevin McCarthy

To live in a world that requires you to become someone else, being yourself is your best choice and most valuable accomplishment."

-Steven Cuoco — Steven Cuoco

I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller. — Terry Eagleton

When I wrote the first Betsy book, 'Undead and Unwed,' I had no idea, none, that it would be a career-defining, genre-defining book, the first of over a dozen in the series, the first of over 70 published books, the first on my road to the best-seller list, the first on my road to being published in 15 countries. — MaryJanice Davidson

Best seller material, and she didn't have to write a single word. — A.L. Mabry

I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let's pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners. — David B. Lentz

The 1947 best-seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex urged that spinsters be barred from teaching children on the grounds of "emotional incompetence." It was the ultimate example of the pendulum swinging - instead of prohibiting the employment of married women as teachers, society now wanted marriage to be mandatory. "A great many children have unquestionably been damaged psychologically by the spinster teacher who cannot be an adequate model of a complete woman either for boys or girls," the authors argued. — Gail Collins

There is no sincere stupidity that doesn't create, eventually, its own rationale, conduct, operating procedures, its own critical formulae whereby it may be, in all seriousness, discussed: witness the advertising business. Witness the best-seller list. Areas of idiocy within which various degrees of the spurious are compared. — Gilbert Sorrentino

People often ask me what advice I have for writers, and I reply that the most important responsibility I believe a writer has is to his or her personal truth. Don't be misled by the best seller lists. Just do what feels true to you. Speak your heart, however strange or revelatory it is. Don't be ashamed of how your imagination works. What a reader wants to discover in a book is what you hold uniquely in your head.I think making stories which touch people deeply is always hard. I've been writing plays and books for 20 years and I still go to my desk every morning with a mixture of excitement and dread. — Clive Barker

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent. — Cyril Connolly

The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective - scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing. — Norman Mailer

The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death. — Cal Thomas

I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film." — Colin Firth

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO BE UNHAPPY ... SO LAUGH INSANELY, KISS SOFTLY, AND MAKE LOVE PASSIONATELY ... — Muffin

I ain't no author, man ... my writing skills are not of 'New York Times' best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't. — Steve Harvey

Insider can be more ludicrous. How did I ever end up [as one]? Carsick [Waters's book on hitchhiking] was on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks. [One of the characters was] a singing asshole that does a duet with Connie Francis! Times have changed. That's mainstream, in a weird way. — John Waters

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Life is a story. Make yours the best seller. — Unknown

l'after-shave, le badge, le barbeque, le best-seller, le blue-jean, le blues, le bluff, le box-office, le break, le bridge, le bulldozer, le business, le cake, la call-girl, le cashflow, le check-in, le chewing-gum, le club, le cocktail, la cover-girl, le cover-story, le dancing, le design, le discount, le do-it-yourself, le doping, le fan, le fast-food, le feedback, le freezer, le gadget, le gangster, le gay, le hall, le handicap, le hold-up, le jogging, l'interview, le joker, le kidnapping, le kit, le knock-out, le label, le leader, le look, le manager, le marketing, le must, les news, le parking, le pickpocket, le pipeline, le planning, le playboy, le prime time, le pub, le puzzle, se relaxer, le self-service, le software, le snack, le slogan, le steak, le stress, le sweatshirt, le toaster and le week-end. — Alexis Munier

Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A "best seller" is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook. — Marita Golden

Sometimes your dream is so special that ... you can't kill it. You can't die even if you try. Life will find a way to fulfill it, and a way to keep you alive. Because the Earth needs dreamers to survive. — Haidji

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent — Logan Pearsall Smith

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. — Flannery O'Connor

I do what I love and what I always dreamed of doing for a living. I write love stories, and I have always had a publisher willing to publish them. I have a sizable and loyal audience. I have made best-seller lists and won awards. What more could anyone ask for? — Mary Balogh

The genius is apparent from page one. . . . A seamless fusion of virtuosity and insight. . . . If William Wordsworth were alive today and writing cyberpunk, this is what he might write.

- David Farland
New York Times Best Seller
Lead judge for the world's largest genre writing competition — Milo Behr

If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye. — Val McDermid

I've interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I've had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success. — Tom Brokaw

If I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous. — Camilla Lackberg

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah. — Edward Abbey

I always knew I was a writer. And I always thought to myself, 'Well, why not me?' Someone has to be on the best-seller list, 'Why not me?' Someone has to write for the 'New Yorker,' 'Why not me?' And I didn't really get much positive reinforcement as a kid, so I thought, 'Well let me show you what I can do.' — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Everyone had a story he believed was worthy of a best-seller; for me, reality was rarely interesting enough to take the place of fiction. — Ben Mezrich

If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. — Thomas Merton

I tell you, life is extraordinary. A few years ago I couldn't write anything or sell anything, I'd passed the age where you know all the returns are in, I'd had my chance and done my best and failed. And how was I to know the miracle waiting to happen round the corner in late middle age? 84, Charing Cross Road was no best seller, you understand; it didn't make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I'd lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life. — Helene Hanff

However, the daily life of the slaves in the South, as observed by many travelers, was obscured for all time by the relentless promotion of a single book, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Even today, any black who dares to say that perhaps we are not as badly off as our brethren in the jungles of Africa is hooted down as an "Uncle Tom." [ ... ] It was no accident that Harriet Beecher Stowe's book became the greatest best seller of its time - it was tirelessly promoted throughout the entire nation, in the most successful book promotion campaign in our history. — Eustace Mullins

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers. — Aldous Huxley

When I'm crusty and old, either of these two sentences will be constantly uttered by my wrinkled mouth.

Yes, I was once on the NY Times Best Seller's List,or,Yeah, I wrote that book that only earned a few pennies

Either of the two makes me a writer, and that's what matters. — Vergielyn

You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else. — Jerry Pournelle

They were ... no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved. — Gloria Goldreich