Book Popularity Quotes

Lemony Snicket. Now, I'm told - the books, of course, starting from the very first one, became hugely popular, selling millions and millions. And I understand that when you used to go around to talk to your very young fans, you would appear as Lemony Snicket's representative or agent.

Also, most people read fiction as an escape - and I wonder whether my books aren't a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.

People who don't normally read make an exception for my books, possibly because they're short.

I have tons of fans in Canada. I've sold hundreds of thousands of books there.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

When I wrote 'Fast Food My Way' in 2004, I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now, more people cook from that book than any other I've written in the past 30 years.

I don't think many people will re-read 'The Da Vinci Code.'

'Fault' became the book everybody and their mother had to read, and 'Paper Towns' is one that's beloved, but it's a bit of a smaller book.

'Youngblood' #1 was my first brush with Internet bashing. Message boards were just emerging, but the criticism was drowned out by millions of copies flying off shelves.

My experience is that books take on a life of their own and create their own energy. I've represented books that have been sold for very little money and gone on to great glory, and I've seen books sold for an enormous amount of money published to very little response.

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

I don't want to write books that are intellectually staggering if nobody's going to read them.

No one likes my books except the public.

Six-hundred-page biographies of German theologians aren't known to fly off the shelves.

Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.

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.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

It's quite interesting, looking back at the first one [film about Harry Potter], nobody knew whether or not it was going to be successful as a film. The books were of course already very successful, but that's happened before, where the books were successful and the films weren't at all. But it turned out that they were.

'Twilight' was a cult film, and the books were huge, but after 'New Moon,' it really blew up.

I was already writing 'The Lost Symbol' when I started to realize 'The Da Vinci Code' would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware.

I know that I am very popular in Holland, in fact I have visited Amsterdam several times to publicize my books. I have a great publisher in Holland and they have published all of my books in Dutch.

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

I was not familiar with the book [before filming in The Outsiders] , though. Interestingly, The Outsiders had not reached the point where it is now, where it's required reading in sixth and seventh grades. In my sixth and seventh grade, we did not, but today everyone does.

Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.

The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get no­ticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof thing.