Nick Hornby Fever Pitch Quotes

We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons. ~ Nick Hornby

Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having
a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say ... ~ Nick Hornby

She would go home and marry a man who owned carpet shops, and she would bear his children, and he would take other women to nightclubs, and she would get old and die and hope for better luck next time around. ~ Nick Hornby

Is the phrase "Deliciously politically incorrect" used with the same gay abandon in the U.S.? You come across it all the time here, and it usually means, quite simply, that a book or a movie or a TV program is racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic; there is a certain kind of cultural commentator who mysteriously associates these prejudices with a Golden Age during which we were allowed to do a lot of things that we are not allowed to do now. (The truth is that there's no one stopping them from doing anything. What they really object to is being recognized as the antisocial pigs that they really are.) ~ Nick Hornby

I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: she hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from. ~ Nick Hornby

We hate Simple Minds. They were no.1 in our Top Five Bands or Musicians who will have to be shot come the musical revolution (Michael Bolton, U2, Bryan Adams, and, surprise surprise, Genesis were tucked in behind them.
Berry wanted to shoot The Beatles, but I pointed out that someone had already done it. ~ Nick Hornby

How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that
not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong?
What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I
miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? ~ Nick Hornby

She was so clever, Dennis thought, and so kind, and he found the familiar gloom descend upon him. ~ Nick Hornby

One can only presume that people who say that their favorite record of all time reminds them of their honeymoon in Corsica, or of their family Chihuahua, don't actually like music very much. ~ Nick Hornby

I could feel the weight of everything then
the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat the world record for falling off a tower block. ~ Nick Hornby

All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often. ~ Nick Hornby

Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There's the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there's the size-doesn't-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem ... and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto. ~ Nick Hornby

It didn't help, reminding herself that if she were back in Blackpool she'd spend the afternoon aching to be in London. It just made her feel that she'd never be happy anywhere. ~ Nick Hornby

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one. ~ Nick Hornby

This is the second Simply Red song on this tape. One's unforgivable. Two's a war crime. Can I fast-forward? ~ Nick Hornby

She thought she'd focus on the compliment, rather than the terrifying glimpse she'd been given into her flatmate's soul. She found herself particularly worried by Marjorie's willingness to do all that, the slicing and the bleeding and the murdering, for only a percentage of the advantages she envied. There was something in this compromise that made it seem more real than Barbara wanted it to be. ~ Nick Hornby

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product. ~ Nick Hornby

He was one of the first people to complain about the increasing encroachment of the state into personal lives, but, actually, shouldn't there be a little more encroachment, when it came to things like this? Where was the protective fence, or the safety net? They made it hard for you to jump off bridges, or to smoke, to own a gun, to become a gynecologist. So how come they let you walk out on a stable, functioning relationship? They shouldn't. If this didn't work out, he could see himself become a homeless, jobless alcoholic within a year. And that would be worse for his health than a packet of Malboros. ~ Nick Hornby

And if you never go anywhere or do anything, life is cheap. ~ Nick Hornby

Ome things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition. ~ Nick Hornby

His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops ... That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn't count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts. ~ Nick Hornby

And it isn't that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live anymore. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home. I feel flat and there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to, so I'd rather call it a day. ~ Nick Hornby

Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by. ~ Nick Hornby

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. ~ Nick Hornby

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while. ~ Nick Hornby

There was the same need for obscurity, the same suspicion that if a piece of music had reached a large number of people, it had somehow been drained of its worth. ~ Nick Hornby

The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought. ~ Nick Hornby

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature
match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here ... he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.
(Hornby's thoughts after reading "Enemies of Promise" by Cyril Connolly) ~ Nick Hornby

Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. ~ Nick Hornby

I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it. ~ Nick Hornby

A couple of months ago, I became depressed by the realization that I'd forgotten pretty much everything I've ever read. I have, however, bounced back: I am now cheered by the realization that if I've forgotten everything I've ever read then I can read some of my favorite books again as if for the first time. ~ Nick Hornby

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. ~ Nick Hornby

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey. ~ Nick Hornby

Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good. ~ Nick Hornby

She was the spare room that never got tidied, the e-mail that never got answered, the loan that never got repaid, the symptom that never got described to a doctor. ~ Nick Hornby

Because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you're prepared to go that extra two inches, and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different
oh, I would have done it if she hadn't been there or he hadn't been there or if someone hadn't sat on my head
but that fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we'd all had ample opportunity not to be. ~ Nick Hornby