Bookshops Best Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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