Nick Hornby Quotations

I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?

The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.

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.

The process you have to go through to get a book published is quite difficult, because books are judged by essentially serious-minded people.

Most of the work, the jokes and the observations and the smaller narrative episodes, come with the actual writing rather than with the preparation.

Of course, I have no idea what you know and don't know. But I have managed to introduce these songs even to people who listen to a lot of music; maybe you have somehow managed to have missed them.

I didn't mind High Fidelity being set in Chicago at all.

But Arsenal fans are probably in two minds about it all, because the last decade has been the best of our lifetimes. We've seen fantastic football, and we've seen our team win a lot of trophies.

I'm all for peace and harmony between the sexes.

I'm a liberal, unrepentantly so, but I often wonder and fear what would happen if I were confronted by any of my liberal beliefs, by somebody who actually who wanted to put them into practice.

I don't think of "High Fidelity" as a real hip book.

I don't think that most songwriters can ever anticipate quite what their songs are going to mean to people.

I get excited about having finished a new book.

Have you got any soul?"" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.

I think with many of the books, I've ended up dramatizing a mood or state of mind I've experienced, so they're not straightforwardly, literally autobiographical.

I think a lot of unpublished writers feel the same way. They're not getting anywhere, and nobody's listening to them. You do get frustrated.

I write the books I want to write, and readers will either respond or not respond.

I think English literature has gotten really bogged down over the last few years.

I still maintain that music is the best way of getting the self-expression job done.

The degree of examination that goes on in film is very interesting for a writer, because there's not a line that goes unchallenged in a script.

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.

That’s the thing with the young these days, isn’t it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish, and short.

Books are long. Even mine. You don't want to feel bad about them as you're writing them.

And we hardly need ever go to the stadium to watch every game live, because they're all on TV.

English authors are very content to write for a very small audience, and I think that shows.

Even at the beginning of the 90s people in England stood on the terraces to watch British players who would almost certainly need a job of some kind when they retired.

I start with a fragment of narrative, or a character, something that seems to have resonance for me and which allows me to explore the kinds of themes I'm interested in.

I've been very lucky with all my adaptations - they were made by intelligent people who liked the books, and I know that not all authors feel this way.

I've never particularly wanted to read a football novel.

On top of that, I'm pretty sick of working on the books by the time they're published.

So the domestic novel can accommodate, should accommodate, a lot of extremity.

There's a hundred million different ways of writing, and it takes you a long time to sort through that stuff. And I think it takes anyone a long time to find a voice.

It's more that, as my writing career goes on, I simply want to extend the range of people I'm writing about.

These things that I write about, not only have I experienced them but they are unavoidable. If you're any kind of human, you are going to have relationships.

If you're a best-selling writer, then they just want to chuck the book out there, because people will buy it anyway.

In the US that layer of celebrity is occupied by film. We don't have that in Britain.

In other words, it's too tough to be a musician at the moment.

I reckon 75% at least of a book has to be omitted from the screen version, and there's no point in agonizing about this once you've taken the money.

But I reserve the right to write the kinds of books I feel like writing.

I am 45, and I am not ready for carpet slippers and 10:30 bedtimes, but I am middle-aged.

I don't worry too much about what I am, what I do, what I want to do.

I could, I think, write a literary novel, but I have no desire to - even my bleakest book has some jokes in it, and I'd feel nervous writing a book with no jokes.

I came away with the idea that I'd like to write books the way people write screenplays. I think I'm not going to let another line go through unexamined.

I do like to read, but, you know, it's hard, and I do like watching telly, and I do like sport, and reading has to fight for its place within that.

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.

Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.

What good were real feelings anyway?

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.

...You can find people. It's like those acrobatic displays.... Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn't really matter who they are, as long as they're there and you don't let them go away without finding someone else.

No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don’t choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.

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.

Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it's hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive.

[H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?

You can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you.

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

Reading begets reading.

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

Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

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

I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.

You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.

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.

I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.

You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.

It's love this and love that but of couse it's so easy to love someone you don't know, whether it's George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you've ever shared Christmas turkey- now there's a miracle.

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.

She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.

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.

He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.

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

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.

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?

We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?

...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.

What went wrong? Nothing and everything.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

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.

Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.

He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent.

I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn't have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chicken pox. You think it's going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn't have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy forever, and I didn't want that.

It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.

The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.

If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

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.

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

No man is an island...

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.

I'd thought I'd live with my wife, but I couldn't find one.

Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am...

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.

But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

I'd stay there, or not, and I'd eat, or not, and I'd drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn't do wouldn't matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.

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.

Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. ... The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy.