Top 100 Quotes About Bookstores
#1. Bookstores contain the residue of thousands of people who went in there to find an experience, a narrative that guided them to a new place or reinforced what they were doing.
Lauren Leto
#2. When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
John Updike
#3. Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.
Jo Nesbo
#4. I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.
George Whitman
#5. Some bookstores want you to believe they're a community center, like they need to host a cookie-making class in order to sell you some Proust.
David Levithan
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.
Jen Campbell
#9. Kids definitely go into bookstores after reading 'Twilight' and want something else like it.
P.C. Cast
#10. If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.
R. Albert Mohler Jr.
#11. I can understand the allure of a venerable Big Six imprint, of a shot at the New York Times list, of a publisher-sponsored book tour, of seeing your hardbacks in bookstores and your paperbacks in supermarkets.
Barry Eisler
#12. Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.
Sara Sheridan
#13. We were the only customers downstairs in the shop and there were no windows and only two dim bulbs, without shades. There was a pleasant soporific smell, as though the books had stolen most of the air.
Ian McEwan
#14. The only way to save bookstores is to keep children coming to them.
Sarah Jio
#15. Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I'm not carried in Christian bookstores.
Anne Lamott
#16. I'm a reader, so when I go to bookstores I need (stuff) that's going to help me. There a big emptiness there and I want to help fill that through song.
Nas
#17. He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.
Garrett Leigh
#18. Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.
Mark Helprin
#19. If you were an alien who came to our bookstores - or browsed our teen magazines - you'd think that only Earth girls who look like Mila Kunis ever got any action.
Rainbow Rowell
#20. I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.
John Green
#21. It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.
Christina Baker Kline
#22. They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they'd be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn't imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores.
Michelle Tea
#23. We call them taxis where I come from. And bookstores." God, he was stuffy. "We call them manners where I come from, Ms. Lane. Have you any?
Karen Marie Moning
#25. People open bookstores because they want their souls back.
(from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)
Elizabeth Tallent
#26. Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.
Gloria Steinem
#27. Oklahoma is the Bad Food Capital of the World, and Oklahoma City is as cheery as an opened casket. No one reads in that city, and bookstores are even rarer there than atheists.
Richard S. Wheeler
#28. Your reciept is your library card.
On what killed the brick and mortar bookstores.
Michael P. Naughton
#29. My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.
Sally Mann
#30. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.
Jason Epstein
#32. I love bookstores and booksellers. In my novel 'Dirty Martini,' I thanked over 3,000 booksellers by name in the back matter.
J.A. Konrath
#33. 'Star Wars,' 'Doctor Who,' 'Forgotten Realms,' even 'Firefly' and 'The X-Files' have shared world novels and other media. I can't help but notice these settings have large shelf space in bookstores, so their publishers and authors are getting something right.
David Conyers
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Bookstores contain groceries for the mind!
Jen Selinsky
#38. There are some writers I think who love to go around and visit bookstores and just interact.
Lincoln Child
#39. I love bookstores. I love the energy in a bookstore and the smell of the paper.
Chris Colfer
#40. In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.
Bill Cosby
#41. 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
#42. What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?
Peter Ackroyd
#43. 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
#44. Indie bookstores love writers as much as they love readers, and there is something about a community store, where you walk in, you feel known, and the delight in books is just infectious.
Caroline Leavitt
#45. On two or three book tours, I have visited bookstores in the Mall of America and signed copies of my books and introduced myself to store employees who I hope will sell them.
Ian Frazier
#46. The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.
C.S. Lewis
#47. I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
Salman Rushdie
#48. Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores.
Annalee Newitz
#49. They do have these things called bookstores there. I've heard tell that if you give them money, they let you leave with a book.
Lauren Morrill
#50. Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves.
Jesse James Garrett
#51. 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
#52. We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.
Roy Blount Jr.
#53. I have done quite a few signings at bookstores, libraries and conferences. I have received phone calls and letters from people who liked the book.
Kate DiCamillo
#54. I've often wondered where Jesus would apply His hastily made whip if He were to visit our culture. My guess is that it would not be money-changing tables in the temple that would feel His wrath, but the display racks in Christian bookstores.
R.C. Sproul
#55. Bookstores are temples and stories are my prayers.
Jaye Wells
#56. Most - and I mean maybe 99% or more - graphic novels are simply fat comicbooks. The term is a bogus, cocked-up concept some marketing whizkid conceived to get comics on the shelves of bookstores.
Jim Steranko
#57. Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who bought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities
their brute persistence.
Nicholson Baker
#58. I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.
Jeff VanderMeer
#59. The more I do bookstores, the more people come up to me from church groups. I spoke at Pittsburg State College and had 2 or 3 ministers and book groups from a couple of churches.
Anita Diament
#60. Some people, of course, say they're practicing tantra. There are a lot of books on tantric sexual practice in local bookstores. These are usually pretty silly books.
Frederick Lenz
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. There is no literature anymore, there are just single books that arrive in bookstores, just as letters, newspapers, advertising pamphlets arrive in mailboxes.
Tonu Onnepalu
#64. I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.
Gabrielle Zevin
#65. I'm in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author, I must tell you, I don't mind this one bit. We buy books aspirationally.
Gabrielle Zevin
#66. Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs.
Wendy Beckett
#67. Somewhat sadly, the survival of many bookstores now depends on selling merchandise other than books.
Julia Glass
#68. Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, Humour studies would that be, sir?
Keith Waterhouse
#69. My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.
Nicholas Sparks
#70. 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
#71. Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.
Stephen King
#72. Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.
Gloria Steinem
#73. What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.
Sarah Jio
#74. In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
Adam Gopnik
#75. We're competing with everything: the beach, the mall, bookstores. Libraries are in a transition right now, caught between two forces, the old ways and technology. Libraries are under a lot of pressure to provide both.
John Callahan
#76. Physical bookstores will become ever-nicer places to be. They are going to have more sofas, better lattes, nicer people working there. Good bookstores are the community centres of the 20th century.
Richard L. Brandt
#77. Bookstores always remind me that there are good things in this world
Vincent Van Gogh
#78. The first thing I do in any town I come to is ask if it has a bookstore.
Robert Frost
#79. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.
Roger Ebert
#80. People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark.
Mary Karr
#81. Books are more precious than jewels. She truly believed this. What did a diamond bring you? A momentary flash of brilliance. A diamond scintillated for second; a book could scintillate forever.
Veronica Henry
#82. It's been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.
John Hodgman
#83. PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.
M.J. Rose
#84. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
#85. Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect.
S.A. Tawks
#86. The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; Neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged.
Lewis Buzbee
#87. And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.
Jeff Bezos
#88. Hugo headed off toward the door to leave, but the bookstore was warm and quiet, and the teetering piles of books fascinated him.
Brian Selznick
#89. After the church ceased to exist, an outfit calling itself the First Amendment Protection Society, Inc. - the largest operator of adult bookstores, topless bars, Internet porn sites, and karaoke cocktail lounges in the United States - intimidated
Dean Koontz
#90. A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.
Jason Epstein
#91. After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.
Elliot Perlman
#92. I always ask the booksellers to look at me and recommend a book; 9 out of 10, they get it right; it's usually a book about someone dysfunctional. To me bookstores are like brothels of imagination, each book is luring me over going, 'Read me, read me'.
Ruby Wax
#93. Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.
Elliott Colla
#94. Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
Reed Hastings
#95. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is a breezy, big-hearted treat, especially if you've ever wondered about the inner workings of America's national treasures
neighborhood bookstores.
Jami Attenberg
#97. I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time.
Gabrielle Zevin
#98. Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.
Paul Acampora
#99. I hate that bookstores are closing. Hate it! What's better than hanging out a bookstore, be it independent or chain, and talking books with people who love books?
Lisa Jackson
#100. I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn't known I wanted.
Mary Ann Shaffer
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