Bookstore Quotes

#1. It strikes me that people want to be engaged, and that those who go into a bookstore in a time of crisis are much more likely to be looking for explanation than for escapism.

Michael Korda

#2. Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

Lewis Buzbee

#3. I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.

George Whitman

#4. My first signing was at my hometown independent bookstore and everyone in the world came. It was so nice. My family was there, my parents, everybody I worked with, all my friends. So I had this great first reading with a like hundred people there.

Sarah Dessen

#5. It's a natural consequence of the capacity of a bookstore or library to contain entire worlds, whole universes, and all contained between the covers of books. In that sense, every library or bookstore is practically infinite.

John Connolly

#6. It seems you can't go anywhere today without seeing some popular culture rendition of Vampyres. I went into a bookstore a few weeks ago and there was an entire section devoted to Teenage Paranormal Romance. Can you imagine?

Abramelin Keldor

#7. Buy other authors' books when you go to their events. Even if you aren't going to read it. Even if you are going to give it away. Even if you aren't interested. Not just for the author but for the bookstore. It's karma and just plain good manners.

M.J. Rose

#8. As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.

Karen Kingsbury

#9. But you're kind of like a great book ... you know, you pick up a book at the bookstore because it has a beautiful cover ... but it's what's inside that pulls you in.

Miranda Kenneally

#10. Future historians will be able to study at the Jimmy Carter Library, the Gerald Ford Library, the Ronald Reagan Library, and the Bill Clinton Adult Bookstore.

George Carlin

#11. Most everything influences my work. Working in a used bookstore. Going for walks in the woods and peering at mushrooms. Writing reviews. Coming from frumpy, grumpy, faded-at-the-knees Winnipeg.

Ariel Gordon

#12. If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

#13. Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

Bill Nye

#14. I invited Onyx to be my plus one. Of course she was all in when I added that Grandma A had a massive swimming pool and was within a short driving distance to a two-story bookstore.

K.R. Grace

#15. A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#16. If I see Marian Keyes' books or Patricia Scanlan's books given more prominence than mine in the bookstore, I'll move mine to the front. I've told them I do this, and they've confessed to doing the same thing to me.

Maeve Binchy

#17. I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there's a good chance it's a book you need in your life. That's basically how I find the books that I read.

Tom Araya

#18. Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village.

Michael Scott

#19. I think, to give our bookshelf a little credit, our area of the library and the bookstore has attracted stronger writers as it's started to thrive.

Margaret Stohl

#20. I've always loved the language of flowers. I discovered Kate Greenaway's 'Language of Flowers' in a used bookstore when I was 16 and couldn't believe it was such a well-kept secret. How could something so beautiful and romantic be virtually unknown?

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#21. Walking away from her ... Now that was a whole different section of the bookstore.
-Markus, Dark Desires at Midnight

Jessica Lee

#22. When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.

Mike Greenberg

#23. I think it's easy to get a book in a bookstore. I think it's just damn near impossible to get a book out of a bookstore.

Larry Winget

#24. For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction.

James Patrick Kelly

#25. When dad says he's going to church, he actually means he's going to a library or a bookstore. - Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac.

Gabrielle Zevin

#26. I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, 'The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.'

William T. Vollmann

#27. There's a bookstore in New York where you could buy scripts, and I got addicted to them because they were easy, quick reads ... and the pictures were so vivid.

Robbie Robertson

#28. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.

Roy Blount Jr.

#29. I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There's one in every town.

Seanan McGuire

#30. I'm an inveterate bookstore wanderer. I read constantly, so I love a good bookstore. I can't help it.

David Crosby

#31. So good you forgot your name tag, Michelle. Something only an unprofessional idiot would do. Not the behavior of a lady I'd want working in my bookstore. You know, a much prettier girl would never have done that. You know the rules. I'm going to have to see you in my office.

Flower Princess Kitty

#32. Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price.

Robert Kiyosaki

#33. When I was a boy in Salem, Mass., in the 1950s, if you wanted to buy a book, you had to take a train to Boston. And when you got there, to a bookstore, there was no such thing as a science-fiction section.

Gardner Dozois

#34. She made an inarticulate sound of distress at the sight that met her eyes. It was a fire, and it was the bookstore on the far side of the square that was burning.

Kaitlyn Dunnett

#35. This is a feminist bookstore. There is no humor section.

John Callahan

#36. Browsing the first editions at my local independent bookstore, I came across 'Pastoralia,' a collection of stories by George Saunders. I'd read one of the stories in it already, and several other Saunders stories in magazines and anthologies, and liked them all.

Trenton Lee Stewart

#37. My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.

Sally Mann

#38. I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun ... if I have to engage somebody between the counter and the door, only the political autobiographies are in danger and who gives a fuck about those?

Jonathan L. Howard

#39. He didn't expect that question to send her tripping over her own two feet and flying into the bookstore's erotica section he'd followed her to. Luckily he had fast hands and caught her before her head could make contact with the Kama Sutra.

Shelly Laurenston

#40. Bookstore operators tell us that the books which head the bestseller list are books on peace and happiness.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

#41. A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Jerry Seinfeld

#42. To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.

Nicole Krauss

#43. I sell well now in Russia. I remember one signing in Russia some years ago where the bookstore had two strongmen to hold the crowds back.

Robert Sheckley

#44. Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Henry Ward Beecher

#45. Can I get a cat?" Ty asked after exactly one block.
"What?"
"A cat. I want a cat. You get a bookstore, I should get a cat.

Abigail Roux

#46. I went to a bookstore to try to find a book. The bottom line is, it all comes by trial and error. It was scary and exciting at first you don't know what to expect. But once you look into your child's eyes, you forget about that.

Michael Jordan

#47. Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

Slash Coleman

#48. Earlier in the summer, I'd found the syllabi to a couple of the courses I was taking at Defriese in the fall, and I'd hunted down a few of the texts at the U bookstore, figuring it couldn't hurt to acquaint myself with the material.

Sarah Dessen

#49. It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

George Packer

#50. Don't be snowed by a handsome guy at a bookstore who quotes Cicero and Proust. They are often not the real thing. As with many fleeting pleasures
travel in their company, enjoy them every so often, and then get on with your life.

Jennifer Kaufman

#51. Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications?

Donald A. Norman

#52. There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give.

Frank Herbert

#53. I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.

Moby

#54. 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

#55. I did discover that if you're interested in low wages, a bookstore ranks below retail clothing sales, except the hours are worse.

Sue Grafton

#56. Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

Helene Hanff

#57. I tell you what's really ridiculous
going into a bookstore and there's all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you're already dead.

Thom Yorke

#58. Just as it can be addictive to be in a real world bookstore or library, it's the same on the Web.

Trip Adler

#59. I come from a working-class family, and I've been working since I was 13, from babysitting to blueberry picking to factory work to bookstore work. And of course, being a mother and homemaker, the hardest work of all.

Patti Smith

#60. When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos ...

Anne Fadiman

#61. I get crazy in a bookstore. It makes my heart beat hard because I want to buy everything.

Reese Witherspoon

#62. Fantasy novels, I don't really gravitate to that part of the bookstore.

Peter Dinklage

#63. V'lane: Are you busy tomorrow MacKayla ?
Barrons: She's working on old texts with me.
V'lane: Ah. Old texts. A banner day at the bookstore.
Barrons: We're translating Kama Sutra ... with interactive aids.

Karen Marie Moning

#64. The bookstore had no musty "old books" smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well.

Charlie Jane Anders

#65. It's one thing for the people in the industry to know who you are, because they've heard about you earlier. I have friends calling me from the Christian bookstore because there's a poster on the wall. It's just weird.

Stacie Orrico

#66. I love bookstores. I love the energy in a bookstore and the smell of the paper.

Chris Colfer

#67. Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.

Natalie Goldberg

#68. We live in a world where you can walk into a bookstore and get a how-to guide on just about anything. But no one tells you how to die with dignity. No one tells you how to go out like the winner.

Andrew Levitas

#69. There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.

Ruth Reichl

#70. You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.

Junot Diaz

#71. I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.

Pat Conroy

#72. Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.

Calvin Trillin

#73. Because sometimes you just have to dance like a madman in the Self-Help section of your local bookstore.

David Levithan

#74. I'm totally into new age and self-help books. I used to work in a bookstore and that's the section they gave me, and I got way into it. I just loved the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.

Jason Mraz

#75. You find any more dead bodies, someone would think you owned a mystery bookstore in Pasadena.

Rhys Ford

#76. My favourite place in the whole city was the Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Anna. It smelled of old paper and dust and it was my sanctuary, my refuge.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#77. Powell's Panic- a condition when one's been away from Powell's bookstore for too long.

Keaton

#78. Nothing will ever replace the experience of wandering haphazardly through a great bookstore, no matter how many algorithms are developed to find matches for our tastes. That's because not only is there no accounting for taste, there is no predicting it either.

Dominique Browning

#79. A lot of the ways of advertising a book - the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore - those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.

Gary Shteyngart

#80. Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

Kate Klise

#81. The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.

Bill Ayers

#82. Despite the fact that he loves books and owns a bookstore, A.J. does not particularly care for writers. He finds them to be unkempt, narcissistic, silly, and generally unpleasant people. He tries to avoid the ones who've written books he loves for fear that they will ruin their books for him.

Gabrielle Zevin

#83. Some writers like to work in other places like coffee shops, but I can't - I'd end up people-watching. And if I were at a bookstore, I'd be reading. Sometimes I have some music on, but usually I like it quiet.

Julie Kagawa

#84. A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

Douglas Coupland

#85. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.

Sally Mann

#86. He looked as if he'd stepped straight off the cover of one of those romance novels she ordered from Amazon so she didn't have to be embarassed by some supercilious male clerk in the bookstore.

Karen Marie Moning

#87. The best moment is when you walk into a bookstore and see a pile of your books - that is the oddest experience in the world!

Michael Scott

#88. Want to inspire your kids to read more? Try giving them kids some money to spend just on a book. Take them to a bookstore and let them browse and pick out one book that they will love. Or try going to a local library for a few hours and just let your kids sift through books that interest them.

Melanie Kirk

#89. I pretty much ran from the front of the bookstore to the new release section and that was all.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#90. Mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition. Not so much a bookstore as a collision of 100 different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over 18 miles of shelves.

David Levithan

#91. In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.

Chris Abani

#92. If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.

Armistead Maupin

#93. If the White House could do more to tell parents that getting children reading is their business too, we'd see a big difference. Hollywood and the NBA or NFL could step in, too. In England they have an event called Book Day, where every child receives a pound to use at any bookstore.

James Patterson

#94. The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It's all an online business now, and that's, you know - the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we're very reluctant to see go away.

Jonathan Galassi

#95. There may be trouble. Anybody goes in there needs to know how to handle a gun. Do you?"

Lovecraft angled her head back until she was looking at Harrelson down her nose. "I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun." pg. 221.

Jonathan L. Howard

#96. A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar's heart.

Michelle Franklin

#97. Just as we were finishing 'Paul's Boutique' we got our own places, and I was going out to clubs a lot less. I got a bit more introverted and spent a lot more time on my own reading. I would just go down to the esoteric bookstore and wander around.

Adam Yauch

#98. 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

#99. I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Gordon Getty

#100. I don't feel sorry for myself, Beck. Lots of people have shitty parents and roaches in the cabinets and stale, raw Pop-Tarts for dinner and a TV that barely works and a dad who doesn't care when his son doesn't come home during a national disaster. The thing is, I'm lucky. I had the bookstore.

Caroline Kepnes