Nick Hornby Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Nick Hornby.

Quotes About Nick Hornby

Enjoy collection of 100 Nick Hornby quotes. Download and share images of famous quotes about Nick Hornby. Righ click to see and save pictures of Nick Hornby quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.

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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in straitjackets are thin on the ground - or no one tells them to me, anyway - but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under 'breakdowns' in the index of A Tragic Honesty. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Clive was rapidly coming to the conclusion that being engaged to somebody meant that he spent an awful lot of time not doing things he wanted to do. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
(for a while, I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which, as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked more or less the whole time), ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
What better way to exorcise rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you? ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
When she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion ... it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
She was so clever, Dennis thought, and so kind, and he found the familiar gloom descend upon him. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Someone like my mum would say, Oh, you're just a kid, you don't know what love is.But I didn't think of anything else apart from being with Alicia, and the only time I felt like I was where I wanted to be was when I was with her. I mean, that may as well be love, mightn't it? ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
But somehow, there's less time to think since she came back. We're too busy talking, or working, or having sex (there's a lot of sex at the moment, much of it initiated by me as a way of banishing insecurity), or eating, or going to the pictures. Maybe I should stop doing these things, so as I can work it all out properly, because I know these things are important times. But then again, maybe I shouldn't; maybe this is how it's done. Maybe this is how people manage to have relationships. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
If you haven't heard him ... man, it's like he boiled down down all the melancholy in the world, all the bruises and all the fucked-up dreams you've let go, and poured the essence into a little tiny bottle and corked it up. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
He was hoping that when this was all over, his spiritual overdraft would have been paid off, and he'd be allowed to use the cash machine again. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I know what's wrong with Laura. What's wrong with Laura is that I'll never see her for the first or second or third time again. I'll never spend two or three days in a sweat trying to remember what she looks like, never again will I get to a pub half an hour early to meet her, staring at the same article in a magazine and looking at my watch every thirty seconds, never again will thinking about her set something off in me like 'Let's Get It On' sets something off in me. And sure, I love her and like her and have good conversations, nice sex and intense rows with her, and she looks after me and worries about me and arranges the Groucho for me, but what does all that count for, when someone with bare arms, a nice smile, and a pair of Doc Martens comes into the shop and says she wants to interview me? Nothing, that's what, but maybe it should count for a bit more. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I've seen men like you in Doris Day films, but I never thought they existed in real life ... The men who can't commit, who can't say 'I love you' even when they want to, who start to cough and sputter and change the subject. But here you are. A living, breathing specimen. Incredible. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
In retrospect, their best chance of doing it this way was against Arsenal, in the game they won 8–2. They only needed another nine that afternoon – and they missed at least fifteen good chances. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn't be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents. Even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment, and she wanted to be in it with them. She wanted to worry herself sick about schools and bullying and drugs. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now? ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn't; as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self confident and I am incontinent ... they have opinions and I have lists. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?'
Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I'd saw there were millions like me, but there aren't, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don't read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Marcus was difficult simply because he frequently gave the impression that he was merely stopping off on this planet on his way to somewhere else, somewhere he might fit in better. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
[about suicide] And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvellous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue­jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, "Excuse me, I was here first." They don't say, "You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity." That would be a bit strong. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Will hated Christmas, for the obvious reason: people knocked on his door, singing the song he hated more than any song in the world and expected him to give them money. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's? ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
We can't go on apologizing all our lives, you know. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
(Even Tucker's way of not living could be described as living, if you had a crush on him.) ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
You see the profound effect literature can have on life? Who says it's all a waste of time? If only I could produce one book that left someone with that kind of ferocious grievance. If you have read one of my books, you probably feel cheated out of however much money it might have cost you, and you'll certainly begrudge the time you wasted on it. But even at my most bullish and self-aggrandizing, I can't quite make myself believe that I've actually wrecked someone's life. Any documentary evidence to the contrary will be gratefully received. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
She sat down next to him, took one of his cigarettes, listened to his apologies. He was distraught, of course: he was just the kind of idiot who could only understand what things meant by doing them first. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
There's no doubt that he's the biggest sports star in the world now.
(on David Beckham) ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I don't really know why it matters so much. Ian could be better at talking than me, or cooking, or working, or housework, or saving money, or earning money, or spending money, or understanding books or films; he could be nicer than me, better-looking, more intelligent, cleaner, more generous-spirited, more helpful, a better human being in any way you care to mention ... and I wouldn't really mind. Really. I accept and understand that you can't be good at everything, and I am tragically unskilled in some very important areas. But sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don't know why. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
At around four o'clock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it's going OK, maybe because I'm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Because it's a brilliant film. It's funny, and violent, and it's got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in it, and everything. And a cracking sound track.

Maybe there's no comparison between Ian sleeping with Laura and Reservoir Dogs after all. Ian hasn't got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in him. And Ian's not funny. Or violent. And he's got a crap sound track, judging from what we used to hear through the ceiling. I've taken this as far as it will go. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I couldn't have written [What Good Are The Arts?] because I
and I'm not alone, by any means
do not have Carey's breadth of reading, nor his calm, wry logic, which enables him to demolish the arguments of just about everyone who has ever talked tosh about objective aesthetic principles. And this group, it turns out, includes anyone who has ever talked about objective aesthetic principles. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I'm ashamed, thinking back Not about the lies I'm used to lying now
No, I'm ashamed of how pathetic it all was. ~ Hornby Nick
Nick Hornby quotes by Hornby Nick
Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...

Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (£1.60 for egg mayonnaise and crispy bacon, and none of us have ever had more than four pieces of crispy bacon in a whole round yet) or anything at all. I will beam beatifically at all times, just from sheer relief. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know if your happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh you'll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again? ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
And she liked me. She liked me. She liked me. She liked me. Or at least, I think she did. I think she did. Etc. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
He had never once felt itchy, in the way that two connecting pieces of a jigsaw never felt itchy, as far as one could tell. If one were to imagine, for the sake of argument, that jigsaw pieces had thoughts and feelings, then it was possible to imagine them saying to themselves, 'I'm going to stay here. Where else would I go?' And if another jigsaw piece came along, offering its tabs and blanks enticingly in an attempt to lure one of the pieces away, it would be easy to resist temptation. 'Look,' the object of the seducer's admiration would say. 'You're a bit of telephone box, and I'm the face of Mary, Queen of Scots. We just wouldn't look right together.' And that would be that. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
She had been dumped a couple of years before by a sort of male equivalent to Charlie, a guy called Michael who wanted to be something at the BBC. (He never made it, the wanker, and each day we never saw him on TV or heard him on the radio, something inside us rejoiced.) ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Sensitive people find it harder to stick around. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
You had to do, it seemed, was ask for an inferior version of the life you'd had before and London would give it to you. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. Tom says football guru Nick Hornby says in his book that men's obsession with football is not vicarious. The testosterone-crazed fans do not wish themselves on the pitch, claims Hornby, instead seeing their team as their chosen representatives, rather like parliament. That is precisely my feeling about Darcy and Elizabeth. They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. I do not, however, wish to see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest. ~ Helen Fielding
Nick Hornby quotes by Helen Fielding
She didn't want her father to die. She would mourn him. She owed him . . . not everything, exactly, because there were lots of things she'd had to obtain for herself, but enough. If, however, the choice was between a brief good-bye and a new life, then it was no choice at all. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men ... in a way that they can't in other contact sports, and the way that t he best team does not necessarily win. And there's the athleticism ... , and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
And I have to say, books haven't helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there's always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is ... Well, it's just you. And when you go, it's gone. Nothing abstract about it. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I know, despite all the gloom and self-doubt that bubbles up from the deep when you get dumped, that you did not represent my last and best chance of a relationship. So, you know. Nice try. Close, but no cigar. See you around. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Maybe if I separate the coincidences out, push them further apart, you might believe them more. One the other hand, I don't care whether you believe them, because they're true. And in any case, I still can't decide whether they are coincidences or not, these things: Perhaps getting something you want is never a coincidence. If you want a cheese sandwich and you get a cheese sandwich, that can't be a coincidence, can it? And by the same token, if you want a job and you get a job, that can't be a coincidence either. These things can only be coincidental if you think you have no power over your life at all. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
So this is supposed to be the how, and when, and why, and what or reading - about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time. "We talked about books," says a character in Charles Baxter's wonderful Feast of Love, "how boring they were to read, but how you loved them anyway. Anyone who hasn't felt like that isn't owning up. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I see now that dismissing YA books because you're not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you're not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I've discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that's filled with masterpieces I've never heard of. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Passion was a part of being human. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The fuck?" he said.
"The fuck?" said Jess. "The fuck what?"
"It's an American abbreviation," said Martin. " «The fuck?» means «What the fuck?» In America, they're so busy that they don't have time to say the «what». ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by 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
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
She stopped typing. If she'd been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn't a satisfying equivalent with e-mail, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
I am a rationalist, and I don't believe in genies, or sudden personality changes. I wanted David's anger to vanish only after years and years in therapy. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid ... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret ... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs. ~ Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby quotes by Nick Hornby
About A Boy Quotes «
» About Ander Quotes