Top 55 Bookshops Quotes & Sayings

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet?

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

It was amazing to me then, and still is, that so many people who wander into bookshops don't really know what they're after--they only want to look around and hope to see a book that will strike their fancy. And then, being bright enough not to trust the publisher's blurb, they will ask the book clerk the three questions: (1) What is it about? (2) Have you read it? (3) Was it any good?

I think that most people go to bookshops and have no idea what they want to buy. Somehow the books sit there, almost magically willing people to pick them up. The right person for the right book. Its as though they know whose life they need to be a part of, how they can make a difference, how they can teach a lesson, put a smile on a face at just the right time.

The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that's all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it's incredible - there's nothing that you can't find out about. It's not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don't go into as many because any book I want.

I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops.

When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.

I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.

Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops.

Its intuition that works. Just intuition.""Waterstones was aimed at me. I knew that I wanted, and badly needed in my life, bookshops just like the ones I was creating. I simply assumed that plenty of other people, no doubt of wildly differing demographics, would find once they saw them that they wanted them too. Well - they did.

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on.

I've never seen an 'English' books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors.

When I go to places and do book tours, I don't really like doing traditional bookshops. It's nice to walk people through something instead of just standing up in a bookstore.

What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.

I travel a lot, so when I arrive in a city, I like to go to good local bookshops and make a selection based on how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. The book I pick usually seems to have a definite karmic connection!

If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers-- booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one-- the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it-- along with first dibs on the new books.

All around us right now, tucked into the valleys and along the coasts, bookshops glow in the winter light. Think of them like singular, magical, and multi-dimensional recipe boxes. They wait for us to pluck out a card, to stand over the stove, to start cooking.

Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

CD stores have the disadvantage of an expensive inventory, but digital bookshops would need no such thing: they could write copies at the time of sale on to memory sticks, and sell you one if you forgot your own.

Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.

My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

I have restaurants, bookshops... but it's not an empire, more... a puzzle. If it were an empire, all my restaurants would be the same.

It's actually as simple as this. New authors, building their customer base, need physical bookshops. Physical bookshops are lovely tactile, friendly, expert, welcoming places. Physical books, which can only be seen and handled in physical bookshops, are lovely, tactile things. Destroy those bookshops, and the very commercial and cultural base to the book industry is destroyed. Once and for all. Like Humpty Dumpty, it can never be put together again.

My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with secondhand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you intrinsically understand the attraction of searching for hidden treasure amongst rows of dusty shelves or you don't; it's a passion, bordering on a spiritual illness, which cannot be explained to the unaffected.

Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration.

Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organisations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.

What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.

I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.

There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane.

I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.

I was brought up in a home where I saw my parents read and I was taken to bookshops and libraries, so I grew up feeling very comfortable around books. Also, Ireland is a country which has honoured its writers and poets, so when someone says they wanted to be a writer, its not mocked or looked down upon.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

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.

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.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

I'm grateful that I've enjoyed the support of libraries, bookshops and institutional funders.

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.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents in the school holidays, and the only books in the house were a copy of the Bible and Agatha Christie's 'Murder at the Vicarage.' I developed a taste for murder mysteries and then later discovered libraries, second-hand bookshops, and jumble sales.

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...

Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures.

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.

I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky secondhand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it.

I particularly like the bookshops at National Parks and battlefields; they often have very unusual and helpful things.

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

Because there is nothing I would rather do than rummage through bookshops, I went at once to Hastings & Sons Bookshop upon receiving your letter. I have gone to them for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn't known I wanted.