A Quote by Mark Skousen

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

Mark Skousen

Quote Topics

Books Classics Negative Seldom

Quote Author

Mark Skousen
American - Economist
Born: 1947

It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.

Barbara Hambly

I'm always astonished when I go into Barnes & Noble at the number of people buying books, of course, but also at the variety of books they do buy and the extent to which they are not the big bestsellers.

Michael Korda

I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason. I prefer to focus on the future. There are a lot of new stories to be heard.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

I inhaled books. I loved Classics Illustrated comic books. These were books that I could afford to buy after I turned in pop bottles for change. 'The Prince and the Pauper,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'A Journey to the Center of the Earth.' Male narratives filled with adventure and self-discovery.

Jewell Parker Rhodes

I often lament that new picture books don't get read because the classics hold up so well. It's a ridiculous complaint because, um, the classics hold up so well.

Rebecca Serle

The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.

Ursula K. Le Guin

That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive - books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.

Anthony Lane

We are living in a time in which movies such as 'Super Size Me' and 'An Inconvenient Truth' have made box-office history, and books such as 'No Logo' and my own, 'The Silent Takeover,' are bestsellers.

Noreena Hertz

The reason why borrowed books are seldom returned, is that it is easier to retain books themselves than what is inside of them.

Gilles Menage

I am grateful for the 30 years of my work and the way it has influenced humanity, especially all the books that became international bestsellers and were translated into 37 different languages, which means they have gone all around the world.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints... I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.

Douglas Coupland

Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned 'Centurions' and 'The Blue Knight' (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers.

Sarah Weinman

I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics.