Quotes About Bookshops

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Bookshops are at the coalface of our industry.

Sara Sheridan

#7. 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

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

Sara Sheridan

#9. I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.

Heinz R. Pagels

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

Nicholas Royle

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Sara Sheridan

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Jen Campbell

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.

Sarah Hall

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. I spend some time every week in independent bookshops all over the country and what I see is inspiring!

Sara Sheridan

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. I remember a time when bookshops smelled of books and not coffee.

David Llewellyn

#35. I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

Charles Stross

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

Hilary Mantel

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.

Mark Billingham

#43. Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. I've stolen books. They're the only thing worth taking that don't belong to you.

Sully Tarnish

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. Read enough books.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#50. Who wouldn't want to get married in a room full of love stories?

Jen Campbell

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Jen Campbell

#54. Books choose their readers, not the other way around. I believe that booksellers are the matchmakers. Thank you.

Cecelia Ahern

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#58. Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better.

Mark Forsyth