Nick Hornby Quotes

Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn't.

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

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.

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

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

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.

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.

my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.

When your sad-like really sad-you only want to be with other people who are sad.

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.

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The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.

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.

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.

Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

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.

But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings.

He's a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones.

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

Vorweg ein paar grundsätzliche Regeln:

1) Ich möchte keine Klagen hören, ich würde zu viel Geld für Bücher ausgeben, die ich dann doch nicht lese. Das weiß ich selbst. Ich habe stets die Absicht, sie mehr oder weniger alle zu lesen. Meine Absichten sind gut. Und schließlich ist es ja mein Geld. Ich wette, bei Ihnen ist es ähnlich.

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

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.

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

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.

When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word ‘metaphorically’, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.

Tucker, please put him down," said Annie. "You're frightening Jackson."

"He's not," said Jackson. "It's cool. I don't like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad.

No one's stopping you," said Jess. "But you've got to make it more interesting. That's why why we drift off and talk about biscuits.

I hate time. It never does what you want it to.

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.

Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.

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.

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.

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself.

The trouble with history, it seems to me, is that there are too many people involved.

I decided, on the spot, to let God into my heart, in the hope that my newfound faith can somehow be used as a vicious weapon in the marital war.

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.

I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably ...

What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.

Den musik man redan har räcker inte en hel livstid, inte om man lyssnar på musik varje dag och så fort man kommer åt.

I've spent nearly thirty years listening to people sing about broken hearts, has it helped me any? Has it fuck.

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?

Well, I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song.

But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...

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.

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.

We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.

He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome.

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything

Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.

Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.

Clockers" asks-almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this-a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart?

(Hornby's thoughts after reading "Clockers" by Richard Price)

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.

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