Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

It's a bloody shame that all the video stores have gone, I'll tell you. Everything's so mechanical now. It's all so if-you-liked-this-then-you'll-like-this. There's no picking something out, or finding some brilliant person to open up new worlds for you.

Sometimes when I pick up a book off the shelf, when I'm buying a new book to read, I'll look at all of them and they all have the exact same words inside, but I'll think that one is meant to go home with me. I'll never pick the first thing off the shelf, I'll always go one behind.

We should all miss bookstores. They let you discover things.

Amazon.com isn't the same as going down an aisle. The same as record stores. You'll go for Billie Holiday, and you buy Gustav Mahler as you're going out the door.

Amazon is holding its own because the service it provides - offering millions of books and other items quickly and easily from home at any hour of the day or night - is a real one, and one that was impossible before there was an Internet.

When I look for new books, I often struggle to find things that challenge and entertain me. This has caused me to spend a number of cycles thinking about where I can get the serendipitous book discovery experience that we had in physical book stores.

Well, another market is being created now out of Internet technology.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

I was lucky enough to be given books that weren't top sellers; books that were kind of under the radar.

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.

Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

I think people get excited about someone discovering something that blew their mind when they were younger. I think it makes people kind of nostalgic and happy. That's one of the really great things about the Internet, that it can bring people together in that way of just being interested in the same stuff.

In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores.

I get up in the morning, do my e-mail, I check my e-mails all day. I'll go online and I'll buy my books at Amazon.com, but I don't want to buy all of them because I want to go to Duttons and I want to buy books from another human being.

My childhood has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.

Just to be back in the world of 'The Librarian' again was such a joy.

In the fast-changing, information-filled world of the Internet, you never know what you might find. Maybe you'll discover a great price on an airline ticket, or maybe you'll come across that quote you've been racking your brain for.