Best Sellers Quotes

• Even if you are a best-seller you feel insecure because it is all so unpredictable.

  Patricia Cornwell

  Insecure, Unpredictable, Feels

  4 Copy quote

• Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.

  Aldous Huxley

  Writing, Mind, Persons

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1926-1929”, Ivan R Dee

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• The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.

  Cal Thomas

  Book, Years, Lists

  5 Copy quote

• Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing

  Norman Mailer

  Writing, Adjectives, Mark

  Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.12, Henry Holt and Company

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• Ask yourself, what makes my book so different? So interesting? Don’t write to be a best seller. Write for and from your heart, not your wallet. Write something you want to be remembered by.

  Leon Nacson

  Book, Writing, Heart

  8 Copy quote

• I ain't no author, man . . . my writing skills are not of "New York Times" best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.

  Steve Harvey

  New York, Believe, Writing

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

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• No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Heart, Character

  7 Copy quote

• Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.

  Simon Sinek

  New York, Book, Writing

  Source: advisor.tv

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• A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Talent, Mediocre, Tombs

  'Afterthoughts' (1931) 'Art and Letters'

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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

  4 Copy quote

• My first book was rejected nine times. It turned out to be a best seller, Battle Cry? in 1953.

  Leon Uris

  Book, Battle, Nine

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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

  4 Copy quote

• I've sold too many books to get good reviews anymore. There's a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best-seller and get frustrated when they can't. I've learned to despise them.

  John Grisham

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.

  Jerry Pournelle

  Research, Littles, Lists

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

  Harold Acton

  Two, Lasts, Fiction

  7 Copy quote

• However, the daily life of the slaves in the South, as observed by many travelers, was obscured for all time by the relentless promotion of a single book, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Even today, any black who dares to say that perhaps we are not as badly off as our brethren in the jungles of Africa is hooted down as an "Uncle Tom." [...] It was no accident that Harriet Beecher Stowe's book became the greatest best seller of its time - it was tirelessly promoted throughout the entire nation, in the most successful book promotion campaign in our history.

  Eustace Mullins

  Uncles, War, Book

  9 Copy quote

• Kids don't know about best sellers. They go for what they enjoy. They aren't star chasers and they don't suck up. It's why I like them.

  Maurice Sendak

  Stars, Kids, Enjoy

  25 Copy quote

• My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.

  Edward Abbey

  Book, Utah, Arizona

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.35, RosettaBooks

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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

  7 Copy quote

• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Education, Teacher, Women

  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose "The Nature and Aims of Fiction" (1969)

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• Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worth of being saved.

  Piero Scaruffi

  Past, Thinking, Rocks

  "Beatles" by Piero Scaruffi, www.scaruffi.com.

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• Writing isn't generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we're doing something that we genuinely love. There's no other reason to work this hard, except that love.

  Melissa Scott

  Jobs, Writing, Ideas

  Melissa Scott (1997). “Conceiving the Heavens: Creating the Science Fiction Novel”, Heinemann Drama

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• I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

  Manuel Puig

  Translations, Sellers

  4 Copy quote

• It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.

  Aldous Huxley

  Book, Men, Two

  Aldous Huxley (1947). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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