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. 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
#5. 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
#6. Kids definitely go into bookstores after reading 'Twilight' and want something else like it.
P.C. Cast
#7. 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
#8. The only way to save bookstores is to keep children coming to them.
Sarah Jio
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.
Garrett Leigh
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.
Gloria Steinem
#19. 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
#20. Your reciept is your library card.
On what killed the brick and mortar bookstores.
Michael P. Naughton
#21. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.
Jason Epstein
#22. 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
#23. '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
#25. Bookstores contain groceries for the mind!
Jen Selinsky
#26. There are some writers I think who love to go around and visit bookstores and just interact.
Lincoln Child
#27. I love bookstores. I love the energy in a bookstore and the smell of the paper.
Chris Colfer
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.
Roy Blount Jr.
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Bookstores are temples and stories are my prayers.
Jaye Wells
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Somewhat sadly, the survival of many bookstores now depends on selling merchandise other than books.
Julia Glass
#50. 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
#51. Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.
Gloria Steinem
#52. 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
#53. In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
Adam Gopnik
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Bookstores always remind me that there are good things in this world
Vincent Van Gogh
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Bookstores, libraries ... they're the closest thing I have to a church.
Jim C. Hines
#72. I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.
Douglas Brinkley
#73. I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.
Daniel Clowes
#74. I love books and going to bookstores. My favorite sound is the sound of the needle hitting the record.
Winona Ryder
#75. My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles, and I've been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.
Denis Dutton
#76. I was a huge fan of 'Mad' magazine when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. I'd scour used bookstores trying to find back issues, and I'd wait at the newsstand for a new issue to come out. My life revolved around it.
Al Yankovic
#77. Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.
Yann Martel
#78. I laughed, disarmed. "Shopping isn't really my thing. Not when there are bookstores to be plundered and tombs to be explored.
Kate Mulgrew
#79. Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#80. Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.
John Connolly
#81. These days, it seems like you can't throw a fish in a bookstore without hitting a high-stakes love triangle
not that I recommend the throwing of fish in bookstores, mind you, as it certainly annoys the booksellers, not to mention the fish ...
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#82. It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.
Jami Attenberg
#83. Just keep her away from bookstores, if you can."
Bookstores.
Thanks, Grayson. That helps.
Apparently whoever said, "no harm ever came from reading a book," hadn't met this girl.
Jena Leigh
#85. Bookstores attract the right kind of folk. Good people like A.J. and Amelia. And I like talking about books with people who like talking about books. I like paper. I like how it feels, and I like the feel of a book in my back pocket. I like how a new book smells, too.
Gabrielle Zevin
#86. As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.
Paul Krugman
#87. I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#88. As long as we have Netfix, Turner Classic Movies, Amazon, YouTube, and bookstores, there is no excuse ever to lack inspiration.
Tim Gunn
#89. Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.
Mary Karr
#90. Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers ...
Anna Quindlen
#91. Profitable bookstores sell books. Unprofitable book sellers store books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#92. My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.
Michael Dirda
#93. Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to the three least-appreciated and hardest-working proselytizers of the written word: independent bookstores, librarians, and teachers.
Gail Carriger
#94. The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film.
Barbara Kruger
#95. As far as Love Dare for Parents goes, you can download the book. You can buy it at bookstores ... We're really excited about it and believe that it's going to make significant impact for parents.
Alex Kendrick
#96. We have branded Jesus beyond recognition. Church has become a business. Jesus is our marketing scheme. We create bookstores, T-shirts, bracelets, bumper stickers, and board games all in the name of Jesus.
Jefferson Bethke
#97. Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire - Hopper, Sargent, Twain - and postcards from beloved bookstores where I've spent all my time and money - Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.
J.R. Moehringer
#98. I always thought that television was the way to go in my goal to invade pop culture because it got to towns in which there were no bookstores. That's how I used to think of it: How do I reach kids who not only don't read but probably have no access to much in the way of books?
Matt Groening
#99. Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
Richard Russo
#100. Happy endings are reserved strictly for the fiction shelves of bookstores
Holly Bourne
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