Edmund Burke Quotes

I'd like to sell a lot of books.

Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind.

The Colonists shall not be permitod to make any woden, linen or cotton cloth, nor weave any other stuffs there, on pain of being banished

Selling books is hard to engineer.

My bookshelves have no order. I prune them regularly and sell the books to Myopic Books, a Chicago bookstore. They give me store credit, and then I spend all the store credit, and, presumably, return to sell them back more of the books I bought from them.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.

The connection between authors, printers, and booksellers must be kept up.

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

I like to have fun out there. I work hard, and then I get to cut loose and go out and tour, and I enjoy it. I like to go out and meet the people. I love to sell books.

Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art.

The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.

I know there's a lot of talk about self-publishing right now. Everyone's giddy with the possibilities. And I'll admit that it looks good on paper: sell your books directly and keep a bigger chunk of the profit for yourself. No rejection letters. No hassle with agents. Sounds good, right?

Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question “Why should I buy this book?

The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.

You're gay, you sell books... you probably shag the books.

A boy has to peddle his book.

I remember Stephen King did a fundraiser one time with J.K. Rowling and he was very impressed with her. But we talk a lot about publishing, bookselling, and book writing. He's been around for ten years longer than me and was a bestseller right off the bat. And he's seen and done everything. It's rare to be with somebody who has been through all of that.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. ... Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.

The violence and double-talk in the Alice books probably does no harm to children, but the novels should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.

[About Swami Vivekanada:] I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism... But it was tremendous - something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings.