Top 70 Bookstore Quotes

I’d go to a bookstore, and I’d flip through flap copy, and I’d think, ‘If this gal can get published, I can get published.’

Books look handsome and it’s a real singular experience getting to go to a bookstore. I don’t want to not do that.

I’ve always wanted to buy a bookstore. You know, sell some of those muffins and a little coffee. I don’t care if we make any money. I don’t want to lose a lot of money, but we could visit with people and get books.

If you walk into any bookstore, you can look at the newsstands and see which magazines are nationally-distributed, and you recognize certain names. Same with television. With the blogsphere, however, you actually have to dig, and know how to use multiple tools to figure out whom you should be speaking to.

My dad was the chaplain at Mankato State University, and my mom worked in the bookstore. We lived just off-campus. Then we moved to the suburbs of Minneapolis, to New Hope, which is where I went to high school.

When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, ‘The Complete Traveler in New York,’ so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.

I’ve consumed true crime since first discovering ‘Helter Skelter’ by Vincent Bugliosi in a used bookstore at age 9 or 10 and staring in fascination and horror at the crime-scene photos in the middle.

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.

I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book’s binder.

I’d never heard of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, ‘Holy cow, what else am I missing out on?’

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

Buy other authors’ books when you go to their events. Even if you aren’t going to read it. Even if you are going to give it away. Even if you aren’t interested. Not just for the author but for the bookstore. It’s karma and just plain good manners.

Television isn’t inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television’s the same way. If you’re going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

This is a feminist bookstore. There is no humor section.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.

I think that every book that’s in a bookstore should entertain in some way.

Here’s an idea: Spend two or three hours a day at least five days a week in front of a bookstore wearing a sandwich board with your bookcover on it while you chase and chat with anyone you can corral and who is willing to talk to you.

Fantasy novels, I don’t really gravitate to that part of the bookstore.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

I first came across the script for ‘Macbeth’ between the ages of 11 and 12; it was the first book that shook my life. Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play.

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I’m always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

I am still a lover of paper books. One of my first jobs was in a bookstore, and I still like to be able to write in a margin and feel the paper. Once inside of a digital device, I end up losing things.

I get crazy in a bookstore. It makes my heart beat hard because I want to buy everything.

I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon ‘Little Sister.’ I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.

By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job.

I didn’t know there was a dying-professor section at the bookstore.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

I’m an inveterate bookstore wanderer. I read constantly, so I love a good bookstore. I can’t help it.

Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire – Hopper, Sargent, Twain – and postcards from beloved bookstores where I’ve spent all my time and money – Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.

A bookstore has thousands of titles to sell. You need to be the guy the store attendant recommends to the reader.

I used to walk in a bookstore and see all these books on the walls. And I would say, ‘Who wants to hear from me? What do I have to add to all of this?’

I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there’s a good chance it’s a book you need in your life. That’s basically how I find the books that I read.

As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they’re struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.

Just about every children’s book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

I’ve always loved the language of flowers. I discovered Kate Greenaway’s ‘Language of Flowers’ in a used bookstore when I was 16 and couldn’t believe it was such a well-kept secret. How could something so beautiful and romantic be virtually unknown?

After school, I’d hang out at the Borders bookstore until it closed.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

There’s a bookstore in New York where you could buy scripts, and I got addicted to them because they were easy, quick reads… and the pictures were so vivid.

Just as we were finishing ‘Paul’s Boutique’ we got our own places, and I was going out to clubs a lot less. I got a bit more introverted and spent a lot more time on my own reading. I would just go down to the esoteric bookstore and wander around.

The first bookstore I loved wasn’t a little independent gem nestled in a neighborhood: it was a modest Waldenbooks in our local shopping mall.

We’re conditioned to let businesses fail, regardless of how much we like them. We believe that if the market doesn’t want that bookstore to exist, then it shouldn’t exist.

I think for Amazon’s customers, it offers a kind of addictive service – the ability to shop without leaving your house, the ability to read without going to a bookstore or a library.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I’d much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you’re open to them.

I was in a bookstore one afternoon, and I stumbled across this book called ‘A Guide to Film Schools.’ I always loved movies growing up and had never even conceived that it was something you could do for a living. Realizing most of them were in Los Angeles and knowing that was warm, I ended up applying.

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

Every newspaper feels it must have an astrology column, and even in the Carleton University bookstore this morning, I found books on astrology for sale.

I think, to give our bookshelf a little credit, our area of the library and the bookstore has attracted stronger writers as it’s started to thrive.

I was a blueberry picker, bindery worker, bookstore clerk and later manager, and a Realtor.

Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village.

I myself don’t know what makes my books work. I enter a bookstore and I’m frankly overwhelmed by the number of books in most of them, and I know people are buying mine.

I don’t want to be in my car all day. I love getting up in the morning in Venice and walking my dogs down to the cafe to get my tea, and then perhaps going to a bookstore and sitting and reading, then walking to the beach.

I can never leave a bookstore without buying a book. I read four or five at a time.