Best Sellers Quotes - Page 3

• Insider can be more ludicrous. How did I ever end up [as one]? Carsick [Waters's book on hitchhiking] was on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks. [One of the characters was] a singing asshole that does a duet with Connie Francis! Times have changed. That's mainstream, in a weird way.

  John Waters

  New York, Book, Character

  Source: www.timeout.com

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• Once you’ve read too many trashy best-sellers, you begin to look for something with substance, something that attempts to define the universe.

  Jessica Zafra

  Looks, Substance, Universe

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• It had been fourteen years and I hadn't had anything published. I had 250 rejection slips. I got my first novel published and it was called Kinflicks. It turned out to be a best seller.

  Lisa Alther

  Years, Rejection, Firsts

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• By the respectable terms of the modern literary profession, novelists do not preach. And, in fact, there has probably not been a less respectable novelist among the irrefutably enduring writers of our time than Ayn Rand: philosopher queen of the best-seller lists in the forties and fifties, cult phenomenon and nationally declared threat to public morality in the sixties, guru to the Libertarians and to White House economic policy in the seventies, and a continuing exemplar or Wilde's tragic observation that more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

  Claudia Roth

  Queens, White, House

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• A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Book, Selling, Wells

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• To be No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, well, that's alarming. Having been a stand-up comedian, I think it's surprising to a lot of people that I had the insight I had.

  Steve Harvey

  New York, Thinking, People

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• If we were a sex manual it'd be a best-seller.

  Rick Carlisle

  Sex, Ifs, Manuals

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• I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

  James A. Michener

  Writing, Eight, Talking

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• God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Atheism, World, Emptiness

  Daniel J. Boorstin (2012). “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America”, p.183, Vintage

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• Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

  Anne Carson

  Epic, Sound, Pressure

  Source: www.npr.org

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• There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.

  Ian Fleming

  Simple, Recipes, Pages

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• If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.

  John Updike

  Book, Writing, Looks

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• The best thing about doing a signing tour is that numbers become faces. I got to sign books for six or seven thousand people, all of whom were dreadfully nice. Everything else, the interviews, the hotels, the plane travel, the best-seller lists, even the sushi, gets old awfully fast. Well, maybe not the sushi.

  Neil Gaiman

  Nice, Book, Numbers

  "Neil Gaiman on writing and 'American Gods'". www.cnn.com. July 30, 2001.

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• Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.

  Amanda Hocking

  Honesty, Book, Self

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• I'm astounded by people who take eighteen years to write something. That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary, and was that ever on the best-seller list?

  Sylvester Stallone

  Writing, Years, Long

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• No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

  Rebecca West

  Writing, Vitality, Fiction

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• Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Art, Men, Enough

  "The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers" by Random House, (p. 25), 1980.

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• One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Self, Creative, Emotion

  "The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers" by Random House, (p. 28), 1980.

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• I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film."

  Colin Firth

  Thinking, Games, Stories

  "Then She Found Me - Colin Firth interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• I've been lucky enough to win an Oscar, write a best-seller - my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre. The only way that's going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentlemen's lavatory.

  David Niven

  Dream, Wall, Dirty

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Eventually, as my books became best-sellers, the nickels pile up and one
  day I was offered a substantial four-book deal that was lucrative as any airliner hijacking in history. Though writing those four books was hard work, at least I didn't have to wear Kevlar body armor, carry heavy bandoliers of spare ammunition, or work with associates named Mad Dog.

  Dean Koontz

  Dog, Book, Hard Work

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• The White Queen in many ways it is representative of the sort of drama that I'm talking about. The books by Philippa Gregory were best sellers and they specifically told the story of history from the point of view of women.

  Colin Callender

  Queens, Drama, Book

  Source: deadline.com

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