Booksellers Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• Hwang Jung-eun is one of the brightest stars of the new South Korean generation - she's Han Kang's favourite, and the novel we're publishing scooped the prestigious Bookseller's Award, for critically-acclaimed fiction that also has a wide popular appeal. She stands out for her focus on social minorities - her protagonists are slum inhabitants, trans women, orphans - and for the way she melds this hard-edged social critique with obliquely fantastical elements and offbeat dialogue.

  Deborah Smith

  Stars, Awards, Focus

  Source: thequietus.com

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• The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghanistan. There are millions of stories out there, millions of potential Booksellers of Kabul or Valentino Achak Dengs.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Kabul, Middle East, Stories

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• it's a good idea to wait a few months before joining anything when you arrive at a village. A bookseller friend who retired to nearby Oxfordshire, and was worried he might be bored, got himself on to every village committee in the first six months, and spent the next ten years extricating himself.

  Jilly Cooper

  Ideas, Years, Bored

  Jilly Cooper (2012). “Angels Rush In”, p.402, Random House

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• I am a writer (and one day I'll be an author). For a long time I was a bookseller (who wrote) or a TV producer (who wrote), but for the last decade or so, its been "writer."

  Michael Scott

  Long, One Day, Lasts

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• There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Song, Drinking, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

  William Boyd

  Book, Successful, Novel

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• If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book. - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

  Voltaire

  Father, Book, Desire

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• [Mid-list writers are now] less greed on the part of both publishers and chain booksellers. It is easier for them to publish and sell only blockbusters and leave the real work to small presses.

  W. P. Kinsella

  Real, Greed, Lists

  Interview with Rob Darnell, robdarnell.com. August 21, 2015.

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• Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Animal, Imagination, Temptation

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• Overall, Id say I was an awesome bookseller, but probably not the best book shelver. I loved recommending books and helping people find books.

  Julie Kagawa

  Book, People, Helping

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• I used to think I should like to be a bookbinder or bookseller it seemed to me a most delightful trade and I wished or thought of nothing better. More lately I thought I should be a minister, it seemed so serious and useful a profession, and I entered but little into the merits of religion and the duties of a minister. Every one dissuaded me from the notion, and before I arrived at any age to require a real decision, science had claimed me.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Real, Thinking, Decision

  William Stanley Jevons's reflections on his earlier life, written when he was 27 (December 1862); later published in "Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons" edited by Harriet A. Jevons, his wife (p. 12), 1886.

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• Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

  Horace

  Men, Poetry, Rate

  'Ars Poetica' l. 372

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• I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

  Karl Marlantes

  Character, Long, Literature

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• 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.

  Mary Ann Shaffer

  Reading, Book, Mind

  Annie Barrows, Mary Ann Shaffer (2011). “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition): A Novel”, p.12, Dial Press

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• I feel like a lot has changed - ebooks are a much more valid format and bigger presses are taking less chances. As a bookseller, there are less real bookstores and more people buying on-line. As a writer, I think there are fewer paths to break through on a big press, but on the other hand there are more small presses doing awesome work now. Overall, artistically, I think it's a pretty exciting time in the literary world.

  Kevin Sampsell

  Real, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• My readers are as diverse as any group you will ever see. Something that booksellers always tell me. That they are always surprised at the kind of people that come to my readings. That they are such a mix of ages and colors. It looks like people spilling out of an elevator.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Reading, Color, People

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.)

  Helene Hanff

  Reading, Long, Wish

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• For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world.

  Christopher Smart

  Reading, Library, World

  Christopher Smart (2016). “Routledge Revivals: The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart (1949): Volume One”, p.293, Routledge

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• I always ask the booksellers to look at me and recommend a book; 9 out of 10, they get it right; it’s usually a book about someone dysfunctional. To me bookstores are like brothels of imagination, each book is luring me over going, 'Read me, read me'.

  Ruby Wax

  Book, Imagination, Looks

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• Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned.

  Alberto Manguel

  Rip, Book, White

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.22, Vintage Canada

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• Some of you...have never read a Patrick O'Brian novel. I beseech you to start now. Start with Master and Commander, which should be available in paperback from your nearest bookseller. And if he-or she-does not have a copy, then beat the wretched fellow.

  Kevin Myers

  Doe, Masters, Brian

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• I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .

  Edmund Burke

  Book, Law, Branches

  Edmund Burke (1777). “The Political Tracts and Speeches of Edmund Burke”, p.382

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• I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader.

  Michael Scott

  Memories, Taken, Age

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• My genre-hopping has caused problems with marketing and sales departments over the years, because they need to know where to position a book with the booksellers.

  F. Paul Wilson

  Book, Years, Marketing

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