Agnes Repplier Quotes

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.

Among the earliest modern commodities were printed books … and their shrinking price and increased availability were far more historically momentous than, say, the spread of the internal combustion engine.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

I'd like to sell a lot of books.

So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!

History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

In the era of Venus Williams, girliness and goo isn't the way to every woman's heart. Yet publishers presume that women only buy a book that looks soft and that appears to be all about women, even if it isn't. Yet women, unlike men, buy books by and about both sexes.

I read a lot for me. But I'm not one of those people who gets 'The New York Times' book review and runs out and buys 10 books and is done with them and passing them out to friends, you know, two weeks later.

There's so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don't have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books - and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them - that's just overwhelming to me now.

Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.

The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

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

Books are like tweets, except longer.

I read a lot of books. So, usually when I go home I try to re-charge my batteries and absorb new stories to become inspired again.

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.

Always I'm working on some of book. That's the way I make a living.

The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.