Best Sellers Quotes

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List.

There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.

Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.

After the Dirk Pitt books became best-sellers, I could afford to buy the more exotic examples of classic autos.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

Universal was absolutely marvelous about sitting down with me and listening to my input. It wasn't something where they chose a bunch of songs that were best sellers. They did a marvelous job on the packaging. It's a beautiful tribute.

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

I haven't won any prizes or had any best sellers.

I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.

Best selling authors are always worth listening to, even if you choose to ignore their advice.

I was an early adopter of the 'Hunger Games.' I read them before they were best sellers - I was on the pre-order wait list for 'Mockingjay' on Amazon.

The Fiction Writer's Co-op has 51 members, from celebrated NYT bestsellers to promising newcomers, and a waiting list.

Controversy sells books.

It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers 'like wot I do.

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.

Kids don't know about best sellers. They go for what they enjoy. They aren't star chasers and they don't suck up. It's why I like them.

'The New York Times' list is a bunch of crap. They ought to call it the editor's choice. It sure isn't based on sales.