The Bookshop Quotes

#1. Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.

Russell Hoban

#2. Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.

Jo Walton

#3. His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#4. I can't see any other reason he would shut down the bookshop, unless it was to help you somehow. He loves books.' She gives me a tiny, owlish smile. 'He must love you more.

Jessica Spotswood

#5. The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#6. The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges.

Nancy Byrd Turner

#7. I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#8. I'm the same way about the bookshop. You know, I walk around and I feel the whole world is in there, the most important stories of all time.

Caroline Kepnes

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

Jen Campbell

#10. And what do you like to do, little man?" "I like-books," James had said. While standing in the bookshop, with a parcel of books under his arm. The lady had given him a pitying look. "I read-erm-rather a lot," James went on, dreary master of the obvious. King of the obvious. Emperor of the obvious.

Cassandra Clare

#11. That day, when I returned to the bookshop after visiting the old house, I found a parcel bearing a Paris postmark. It contained a book called The Angel of Mist,

Anonymous

#12. 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

#13. How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.

Julian Barnes

#14. Words cannot do justice to the pleasures of a good bookshop. Ironically.
(Waterstones Trafalgar Square)

Waterstones

#15. For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.

F. Sionil Jose

#16. I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.

Malorie Blackman

#17. Going to open a quaint little bookshop and have a niche section called "Men's Interests" where we shelve the Western Cannon.

Alana Massey

#18. Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: ', with love from Momma.

Vincent Starrett

#19. I part-own a bookshop for some strange coincidence of reasons, and it is one of the best things I part-own in my life, or own in my life. I do not know, it just feels great.

Lily Cole

#20. I see the beauty of books and sacred-souls of every author displaced in a bookshop.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#21. 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

#22. It's like he's picking up parts of the world and showing them to me, saying, See? It's beautiful.

Cath Crowley

#23. The average buyer in bookshop spends 8 seconds on the front cover and 15 seconds on the back cover before deciding whether to purchase the book or not. On average, he does not get past page 18. See? The odds are stacked against us writers!

Ashwin Sanghi

#24. In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.

Rachel Hall

#25. The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin's cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look. Claire (Watermelon)

Marian Keyes

#26. If you do come across 'Sanctus' in a bookshop, please see past the cross on the cover and the sinister outline of a monk and just read the first page and make your own mind up. If it's still not for you, then that's fine; just put it back and walk away.

Simon Toyne

#27. That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.

Christopher Morley

#28. Puckett's Stacks was not the sort of bookshop one happened upon; it was the sort of bookshop for which one looked deliberately.

C. Robert Cargill

#29. Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.
John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.

John Fowles

#30. I remember going into a bookshop, and the only book I saw with a black child on the cover was 'A Thief in the Village' by James Berry, and I thought, 'Is this still the state of publishing?' Then I thought, 'Either I can whine about it or try to do something about it.'

Malorie Blackman

#31. When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.

Sarah Hall

#32. A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world and making a difference.

David Almond

#33. I am a regular, if not exactly enthusiastic, patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it's important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.

Will Self

#34. I saw Roland Barthes's 'Mourning Diary' at a bookshop, and I felt it was like I was destined to see the book. I read it all in one go while I was in the shop. The book was mind-blowing.

Go Ah-sung

#35. If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.

Mark Haddon

#36. I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.

Friedrich Hayek

#37. When I was 13, I had a weekend job at the Photographers Gallery Bookshop in London.

Beeban Kidron

#38. Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.

John Waters

#39. I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.

Marilyn Hacker

#40. 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

#41. Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.

Orhan Pamuk

#42. Famous Harry Potter," said Malfoy. "Can't even go to a bookshop without making the front page.

J.K. Rowling

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

Sara Sheridan

#44. Bookshop Customer: 'Who wrote the bible?'
Customer's friend: 'Jesus.

Jen Campbell

#45. 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

#46. I love lying here with you, under the books.

Cath Crowley

#47. There was, as she put it, nothing to stop me. So I followed the path of educated misfits through the ages and got a job in a bookshop.

Hari Kunzru

#48. When you walk past a bookshop you haven't visited before, you have to go in and look around. That's the family rule.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#49. To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.

Virginia Woolf

#50. I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening ... like a light in the midst of the darkness.

Vincent Van Gogh

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.

Vincent Van Gogh

#55. It is with the common book that most readers will spend their head-tilted hours.
from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Lewis Buzbee

#56. And the city would have a library, too. A great, wonderful library. Or a bookshop with a knowledgeable owner who could make sure her thirst for books was always sated.

Sarah J. Maas

#57. I quite frankly enjoy the touch and feel of a store, so I am a big bookshop person. Or, I go to an electronics store; Best Buy and Croma are places I could spend a lot of time in.

Ratan Tata

#58. 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