Booksellers Quotes

• I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.

  Elizabeth Hand

  Book, Thinking, Suspense Novels

  On "Mortal Love" at HarperCollins, 2004.

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• I've mis-signed many a book Rollins or Clemens. My readers quickly become aware. Booksellers will often promote me under both names, and I do plug both at signings. Generally, the fantasy reader has no problem going into the suspense genre. It's harder for the typical suspense reader to go the other direction.

  James Rollins

  Book, Names, Suspense

  16 Copy quote

• You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that's the secret weapon of the bookstore - is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.

  John Green

  Book, Secret, Algorithms

  7 Copy quote

• I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

  Piers Anthony

  Book, Self, Amazon

  Interview with Dag Rambraut, www.sffworld.com. June 5, 2000.

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• Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

  Alain de Botton

  Lonely, Book, Being Alone

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton (Chapter IV "Consolation For Inadequacy", p. 148), 2000.

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• The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.

  Ray Bradbury

  Teacher, Giving, Speak

  Foreword to "A Passion for Books" by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, 1999.

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• Your second-hand bookseller is second to none in the worth of the treasures he dispenses.

  Leigh Hunt

  Second Chance, Hands, Treasure

  Leigh Hunt (1873). “Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs”, p.58

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• Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

  Horace

  Men, Poetry, Mediocrity

  "Ars Poetica". Poem by Horace, Lines 372 - 373, c. 18 BC.

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• You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller.

  John Green

  Book, Algorithms, Good Book

  7 Copy quote

• The booksellers are generous liberal-minded men.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Generous

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into North Wales”, p.352

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• I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Hilarious, Sarcastic

  79 Copy quote

• Books are easy to find and easy to buy. A paperback these days only costs six or seven dollars. You can borrow that from your kids!

  Jim Rohn

  Book, Kids, Dollars

  FaceBook post by Jim Rohn from Apr 05, 2015

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• Anybody who puts a book into someone else's hands inspires me - teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents.

  Kate DiCamillo

  Teacher, Book, Hands

  Source: blog.booksamillion.com

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• There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Kings, Writing, Men

  7 Copy quote

• there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Laughter, Book, Play

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (1931). “My story”, Farrar & Rinehart

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• "Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged".

  Terry Pratchett

  Speak, Print

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• Millions of people are provided with their thoughts as with their clothes; authors, printers, booksellers, and newsmen stand, in relation to their minds, simply as shoemakers and tailors stand to their bodies.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Clothes, People, Mind

  7 Copy quote

• Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

  Lev Grossman

  Reader

  4 Copy quote

• Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers' shelves permit ordinary poets to exist.
  [Lat., Mediocribus esse poetis
  Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae.]

  Horace

  Men, Ordinary, Poet

  4 Copy quote

• Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it's hard to be happy about a bookseller's demise.

  Susan Orlean

  Fate, Decision, Borders

  "Bookmarked" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. February 17, 2011.

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• There is no part of the country where in the summer you cannot get a sufficient supply of the best specimens. Teach your children to bring them in for themselves. Take your text from the brooks, not from the booksellers.

  Louis Agassiz

  Summer, Country, Children

  4 Copy quote

• I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.

  Christopher Morley

  Wish, Future Happiness, World

  Christopher Morley (2013). “The Haunted Bookshop”, p.123, Melville House

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• A man's bookseller should keep his confidence, like his physician. What can become of a world where every man knows what another man reads? Why, sir, books would become like quacks' potions, with every mountebank in the newspapers claiming one volume's superiority over another.

  P.B. Kerr

  Book, Men, Physicians

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• The connection between authors, printers, and booksellers must be kept up.

  James Boswell

  Connections, Printer

  James Boswell (1956). “London Journal, 1762-1763, as First Published in 1950 from the Original Manuscript”

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• A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. [Noël] France was the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat and waste a little time between sales. Nowadays books are bought standing. A request for a book and the naming of the price: that is the sort of transaction to which the all-devouring activity of modern trade has reduced bookselling, which used to be a matter for dawdling, idling, and chatty, friendly browsing.

  Jules de Goncourt

  Book, Friendly, Littles

  4 Copy quote