Quotes & Sayings About Bookshops

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored. — Anais Nin

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

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

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

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

These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war.
Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are.
All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard. — Jen Campbell

Read enough books. — Lailah Gifty Akita

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

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

When he was in a bad mood, The Writer went to the park. The only place he considered friendly. Not the bookshops crammed with titles, with those harsh lights and those piles of books that seemed like barricades, not the street with its narrow, dirty pavements overhanging the traffic, not the noisy restaurants stinking of fried food, not the sweltering buses, not the deserted shops with their assistants waiting for customers like hungry cannibals, not the cinemas with numbered seats in which it only took one transgressor to screw up the whole auditorium, but the park. — Filippo Bologna

Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops. — Sara Sheridan

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

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

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

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

It was amazing to me then, and still is, that so many people who wander into bookshops don't really know what they're after
they only want to look around and hope to see a book that will strike their fancy. And then, being bright enough not to trust the publisher's blurb, they will ask the book clerk the three questions: (1) What is it about? (2) Have you read it? (3) Was it any good? — Mary Ann Shaffer

The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that's all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it's incredible - there's nothing that you can't find out about. It's not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don't go into as many because any book I want ... — David Bowie

But I grew to love these spontaneous gatherings in shopping malls, university bookstores, and specialty bookshops that couldn't be replaced by the big chains, all the spaces with coffee, comfortable chairs, and the presence of books that allow people to browse and discover interests they didn't know they had. — Gloria Steinem

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

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 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

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

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

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

What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it. — William Boyd

Books choose their readers, not the other way around. I believe that booksellers are the matchmakers. Thank you. — Cecelia Ahern

I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock. — Nicholas Royle

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

Its intuition that works. Just intuition.""Waterstones was aimed at me. I knew that I wanted, and badly needed in my life, bookshops just like the ones I was creating. I simply assumed that plenty of other people, no doubt of wildly differing demographics, would find once they saw them that they wanted them too. Well - they did. — Tim Waterstone

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

I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it. — Helene Hanff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry. — John Scott

It is, incidentally, a favour that e-books have done for the Good Bookshop: they have made books beautiful again. A few years ago, book covers could be rather drab affairs: the title and the author's name printed over a stock photograph of something Vaguely Relevant. If you wanted to read it, you had to take it as it was. Whereas now, in these new and glorious days when the margins on physical are that little bit higher than on the electrical alternative, publishers produce exquisite bindings. Bookshops haven't been this pretty for at least a century. — Mark Forsyth

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

I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams' types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights with nothing but the whoosh of a wooden ceiling fan to keep me company, and the joy of finding the cool spot on the bed. I would while away my days jotting down my thoughts in a battered leather-bound notebook, which would have been given to me by some former lover. My scribbling would form the basis of a best-selling novel, which they wold discuss in tiny independent bookshops on quaint little streets in forgotten corners of terribly romantic European cities. In other words, I fantasize about being credible, in that artistic, slightly bohemian way that only girls with very long legs can get away with. — Amy Mowafi

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

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

Amidst the dust of bookshops, wide dispersed
And never purchased there by anyone,
Yet similar to precious wines, my verse can wait
Its time will come. — Marina Tsvetaeva

How he described the bookshop: where the streets of the world meet the avenues of the mind. — Jen 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

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world
the brains of men. — Christopher Morley

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

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

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

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

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

Lignin, an organic polymer found in trees, is chemically similar to vanillin, the primary extract of the vanilla bean. So when trees are made into books and kept for long periods of time, the lignin in the paper breaks down and starts to smell like vanilla.
This is why antiquarian books, and secondhand bookshops, smell so damn good. — Jen Campbell

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

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

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

CUSTOMER: If I were to, say ... meet the love of my life in this bookshop, what section do you think they would be standing in? — 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

Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better. — Mark Forsyth

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

My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops. — Neil Gaiman

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn't allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren't noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor's steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one's sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence. — Wendy Welch

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 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

Words have a taste, sweet but subtle, like dark chocolate; the scent of old bookshops; a flamenco rhythm; the feeling of the rain on your face on sunny days. Words are cruel and spiteful sometimes, wise and loving at others. — Chloe Thurlow

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. — George Orwell

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

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

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

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

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty. — Douglas Adams

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. — Jen Campbell

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

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

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you. — Doris Lessing

One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops. — J.G. Ballard

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

I travel a lot, so when I arrive in a city, I like to go to good local bookshops and make a selection based on how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. The book I pick usually seems to have a definite karmic connection! — Yoko Ono

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

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

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