Blurbs Quotes

#1. Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question Why should I buy this book?

Guy Kawasaki

#2. What does 'hmm' have to do with anything? Could you ever use more than five words? All this grunting and minced words make you come across - primal."

His smile tipped higher. "Primal."

"You're impossible."

"Me Jev, you Nora.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#3. Younger writers are always looking for "blurbs," one of the few words that sounds exactly as awful as the crime it's describing.

Brian K. Vaughan

#4. Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything.

Banana Yoshimoto

#5. To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all.

Emily Gould

#6. My feeling was that I simply didn't have the enthusiasm to do reinvention.

Roger Daltrey

#7. Dear FB Friends,
Fuck Facebook!!!!! - It has proven to be worthless as a book-selling device, and is nothing but a repository for perverts, reparation-seekers, old buddies looking for handouts, syphillitic ex-girlfriends looking for extra-curricular schlong and hack writers begging for blurbs.

James Ellroy

#8. Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.

Gabrielle Zevin

#9. You know, the critics never change; I'm still getting the same notices I used to get as a child. They tell me I play very well for my age.

Mischa Elman

#10. Look at the news stand, you know? I mean, it's a cacophony of famous people or people who want to be famous with blurbs all around it, and it's supposed to be, you know, that's supposed to be creativity in journalism. My God, it's unbelievable. It's shocking.

George Lois

#11. Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs.

Wendy Beckett

#12. The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

Diane Wakoski

#13. I have done extensive research and, almost universally, found that the people who view my blurbs and observations as "anti-family" are dicks.

Jim Gaffigan

#14. Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text - compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping - what is this, electroshock torture?

Ursula K. Le Guin

#15. I have a Damien Hirst spot painting which I love. It has pride of place over my dining-room table.

Cat Deeley

#16. Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.

Tom Hodgkinson

#17. As much as we seek approval, we dread condemnation

Dale Carnegie

#18. New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys ... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.

Nelson Algren

#19. I don't want to be in the Jerry Sandusky business.

Bob Costas

#20. Blurbs don't work anymore!" was another. "You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!" seemed at best debatable.

Scott Westerfeld

#21. Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.

Clayton M Christensen

#22. The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.

Miriam Toews

#23. If you told me when I was a teen that I would end up being a teacher, I would have said you're out of your mind, because quite frankly I hated school.

Tim Gunn

#24. The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history.

Teju Cole

#25. Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

Laurence J. Peter

#26. You get to the point where you realize that unless you, yourself, become more of the change, you can't create too much change.

Marianne Williamson

#27. He had referred to blurbs as the blood diamonds of publishing.

Gabrielle Zevin

#28. The etiquette of blurbs means it's not hard to not blurb something (if it's not by a friend, or student): everyone knows how many books you're deluged with. You can just say you never got to it.

Jim Shepard

#29. I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

Leslie Fiedler

#30. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices and devote yourself for a fake love to prove it the most real one.

M.F. Moonzajer

#31. You don't even know these people in your blurbs. Most of them are dead and Stephen King is probably going to press charges. We're really going to need to increase your visits. - MY CURRENT SHRINK

Jenny Lawson