Top 100 Nick Hornby Quotes
#1. Read anything, as long as you can't wait to pick it up again.
Nick Hornby
#2. He was beginning to wonder whether June's facility, and their shared interest, might serve them better in the long run than a passionate sexual relationship that would eventually die on them.
Nick Hornby
#3. 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
#4. They were expressions of who he was and what he'd become, and he couldn't do anything about any of it, apart from retrace his steps back and back and back, until he was fifteen or ten or three years old, and start again.
Nick Hornby
#5. I've had countless conversations with or about people who are "sleeping in separate bedrooms", as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it's the rest of life that horrifies.
Nick Hornby
#6. It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.
Nick Hornby
#7. 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
#8. All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll learn nothing from it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.
Nick Hornby
#9. She began to fear that she would always be greedy, all the time. Nothing ever seemed to fill her up. Nothing ever seemed to touch the sides.
Nick Hornby
#10. You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.
Nick Hornby
#11. Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.
Nick Hornby
#12. If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements..
Nick Hornby
#13. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Nick Hornby
#14. We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?
Nick Hornby
#15. 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
#16. Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.
Nick Hornby
#17. Anyone who thinks text messages are funny isn't going to kill himself. There isn't enough going on internally.
Nick Hornby
#18. What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad, and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but "love" would have to do for now.
Nick Hornby
#19. She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything. And then, after the regret had flared and burned out, she didn't care. He should know, she thought. She wanted him to know. She felt something for somebody, and she'd told him.
Nick Hornby
#20. So the whole conversation is going right off course. It's like a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, because all the time I'm thinking, this should be easy to push along, and everything I say just takes me in the wrong direction.
Nick Hornby
#21. 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
#22. Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
Nick Hornby
#23. I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgement. The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be.
Nick Hornby
#24. 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
#25. Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.
Nick Hornby
#27. Some of it can, of course. The new satirical shows
Nick Hornby
#28. I couldn't bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.
Nick Hornby
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. She wasn't the sort of catch one could take home and show off to people; she was the sort of catch that drags the angler off the end of the pier and pulls him out to sea before tearing him to pieces as he's drowning. He shouldn't have been fishing at all, not when he was so ill-equipped.
Nick Hornby
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Nick Hornby
#34. 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.
Nick Hornby
#35. This is the second Simply Red song on this tape. One's unforgivable. Two's a war crime. Can I fast-forward?
Nick Hornby
#36. 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
#37. We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.
Nick Hornby
#38. I wanted to hurt her, on this day of all days, just because it's the first time since she left that I've been able to.
Nick Hornby
#39. 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
#40. I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
Nick Hornby
#41. Influential books are often a disappointment, if they're properly influential, because influence cannot guarantee the quality of the imitators, and your appetite for the original has been partially sated by its poor copies.
Nick Hornby
#42. We wrote about whatever we wanted, and we ended up with eighteen million people watching us. That's the thing about television comedy, isn't it? It makes us all a part of something. That's what I love about it.
Nick Hornby
#43. I've developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way
Nick Hornby
#44. When I'm arguing with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I'm going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. "This is *really* who I am," I'll tell him.
Nick Hornby
#45. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.
Nick Hornby
#46. So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.
Nick Hornby
#47. It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story.
Nick Hornby
#48. This script was like a dish made from things you'd found in your larder and had to use up before they went off: a Welsh mountain, a casino, a blonde with a big bust.
Nick Hornby
#49. I really don't want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!
Nick Hornby
#50. It's no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won't find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.
Nick Hornby
#51. 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 ...
Nick Hornby
#52. We can't go on apologizing all our lives, you know.
Nick Hornby
#53. Back in gear, she closed the door on him. She leaned against it, felt the heat drain from her cheek into the cold wood. And then the dog was there with her in the narrow hallway. She smelled the meat on
Nick Hornby
#54. Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy
but he doesn't see why weltschmerz shouldn't come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass
the edge of the left cheek, say.
Nick Hornby
#55. Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting.
Nick Hornby
#56. She of all people knows what compilation tapes represent.
Nick Hornby
#57. I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.
Nick Hornby
#58. I have a really low boredom threshold.
Nick Hornby
#59. Don't you ever have conversations where someone took a wrong turn at some point, and then it goes on and on and it becomes too late to put things right?
Nick Hornby
#60. That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
Nick Hornby
#61. He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.
Nick Hornby
#62. Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.
Nick Hornby
#63. Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.
Nick Hornby
#64. You were going to take me bikini shopping?" "Not me, dear. Patsy. I'm not interested in looking at curvy young women in bikinis. I'm deeply in love with my wife and I'm only interested in money.
Nick Hornby
#65. What really matters is what you like, not what you are like
Nick Hornby
#66. Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.
Nick Hornby
#67. Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.
Nick Hornby
#68. I can't tell you how good and bad I felt. Yes I can: I felt like a baked Alaska.
Nick Hornby
#69. What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope; I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.
Nick Hornby
#70. Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.
Nick Hornby
#71. For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.
Nick Hornby
#72. So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.
Nick Hornby
#73. She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.
Nick Hornby
#74. Anyway, all I'm saying is that there was this time
maybe it was a day, maybe a few days, I can't remember now
when everything seemed to have come together. And so obviously it was time to go and screw it all up.
Nick Hornby
#75. 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.
Nick Hornby
#76. ... it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on.
Nick Hornby
#77. There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby.
Nick Hornby
#78. 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
#79. See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I'm looking for someone, and before I know it I've
found her.
Nick Hornby
#80. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.
Nick Hornby
#81. Being a freak isn't the same thing as having a talent.
Nick Hornby
#82. Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.
Nick Hornby
#83. This is how I feel, every day, and people don't want to know that. They want to know that I'm feeling what Tom Jones makes you feel. Or that Australian girl who used to be in Neighbours. But I feel like this, and they won't play what I feel on the radio, because people that are sad don't fit in.
Nick Hornby
#84. 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
#85. 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.
Nick Hornby
#86. He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.
Nick Hornby
#87. Maybe nobody went to see the Rolling Stones here in 1964,' said Ros. 'The dead shark was just too much fun.
Nick Hornby
#88. 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.
Nick Hornby
#89. 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
#90. But Tony was a storyteller, and he knew that if you looked at any narrative closely enough you could trace the unraveling back and back and back - right to the very beginning, if the story was good enough.
Nick Hornby
#91. 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
#92. And it's not that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live any more. 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.
Nick Hornby
#93. Life was about to begin, so Arsenal had to go.
Nick Hornby
#94. (about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the Arts and Lit non-fiction section)
I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
Nick Hornby
#95. Self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.
Nick Hornby
#96. We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I'm not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.
Nick Hornby
#97. (Even Tucker's way of not living could be described as living, if you had a crush on him.)
Nick Hornby
#98. Human beings are millions of things in one day.
Nick Hornby
#99. If, during his engagement to Edith, someone had tried to explain how lonely marriage could be, he wouldn't have believed it.
Nick Hornby
#100. Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented.
Nick Hornby
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