Bookselling Quotes

“We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award”
― Kate DiCamillo

“To write books is easy, it requires only pen and ink and the ever-patient paper. To print books is a little more difficult, because genius so often rejoices in illegible handwriting. To read books is more difficult still, because of a tendency to go to sleep. But the most difficult task of all that
a mortal man can embark on is to sell a book.”
― Stanley Unwin

“Every day, we pay lip service to democratic values and then again and again make undemocratic choices in the marketplace. Bestsellers are bestsellers because we buy them: nothing more.”
― Lisa Adams, Why We Read What We Read: A Delightfully Opinionated Journey Through Bestselling Books

“Sometimes authors treat their books are burgers. More they want to sell, more spices they put in.”
― Sudhir Mittalittal

“Okay, so I know I’m not the last bookseller. People still sell books. But I’m one of the last of a certain kind of bookseller. The kind that for six hundred years rooted around basements, book bins, and bookstores looking for, sometimes, rare books or, more often, secondhand books. They were the hunter-gatherers of the book business, the travelers and pick-ers, who spent their lives saving books that might otherwise have been lost. They are, now, nearly extinct, driven to ground by the machines—the cell phones, personal computers, and, especially, the internet—that replaced them at the end of the twentieth century.”
― Gary Goodman, The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade

“We head for my favourite little bookshop just off the canal, which is like a naughty boy's bedroom full of dusty books and graphic novels and comics and posters stuck to the ceiling and walls, with an old man, the owner, always hidden behind stacks of books.”
― Jayne Tuttle, My Sweet Guillotine

“On the news this morning was a story about four men who have been abducted from a bookshop in Hong Kong for disseminating literature critical of the Chinese regime. Bookselling can be a perilous business, but mercifully only financially so in Wigtown.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“Joy is the enhancement of happiness through knowledge. We as booksellers have more of an opportunity to spread that joy through the books we present and those we find meaningful.”
― Paul Yamazaki, Reading the Room: A Bookseller's Tale