Hornby Quotes

#1. The contemporary authors I most admire are Nick Hornby and Jonathan Tropper.

Mike Greenberg

#2. I'm very confident that Nick Hornby always gets it right as a writer. He has the vernacular and passion. He is adroit and dry, and balances humor with the humanity of life.

Pierce Brosnan

#3. There was just a beautiful, unearthly silence. He thought of the wood and the bluebells, the owl and the fox, a Hornby train trundling around his bedroom floor, the smell of a cake baking in the oven. The skylark ascending on his thread of song. F-Fox

Kate Atkinson

#4. The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it ... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.

Zadie Smith

#5. I hope that when people are happy together, it feels as though someone keeps piling seconds and thirds on their plates.

Nick Hornby

#6. People who were born in '66 are nearly fifty? I know the show's fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I'd have guessed that Tim was twenty-five for thirty.

Nick Hornby

#7. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

Nick Hornby

#8. His father fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.

Nick Hornby

#9. Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends, it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was reciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out.

Nick Hornby

#10. [ ... ] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

Nick Hornby

#11. That night taught me one of life's most useful lessons, one of the only pieces of advice I have to offer to younger generations: YOU'RE ALLOWED TO WALK OUT!

Nick Hornby

#12. Read anything, as long as you can't wait to pick it up again.

Nick Hornby

#13. 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

#14. It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself

Nick Hornby

#15. But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.

Nick Hornby

#16. It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

Nick Hornby

#17. [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?

Nick Hornby

#18. Sensitive people find it harder to stick around.

Nick Hornby

#19. 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

#20. What better way to exorcise rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you?

Nick Hornby

#21. 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.

Nick Hornby

#22. Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.

Nick Hornby

#23. 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

#24. Top five things I miss about Laura ... Two: she's got character ... she's loyal and honest, and she doesn't even take it out on people when she's having a bad day. That's character.

Nick Hornby

#25. 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

#26. It was easy to be nice to an attractive woman over a dinner table. The despair came later, with children and tiredness and the sheer drudgery of marriage and monogamy.

Nick Hornby

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition

Nick Hornby

#30. Was everything an accident of geography?

Nick Hornby

#31. 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

#32. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are.

Nick Hornby

#33. I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids.

Nick Hornby

#34. Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

Nick Hornby

#35. The problem here is that unless a team is playing well, winning things, filling their stadia, clubs simply cannot afford to alienate the very

Nick Hornby

#36. 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

#37. Barbara began to imagine the pretty girls working in Derry and Toms as beautiful tropical fish in a tank, swimming up and down, up and down, in serene disappointment, with nowhere to go and nothing to see that they hadn't seen a million times before.

Nick Hornby

#38. It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.

Nick Hornby

#39. It was funny how you could still know little things about people, like where they kept their tin, even though you didn't know what they were thinking from one week to the next.

Nick Hornby

#40. It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.

Nick Hornby

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.

Nick Hornby

#44. In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material.

Nick Hornby

#45. I'm going to take every chance I get to make a nuisance of myself when somebody I admire is in the vicinity ...

Nick Hornby

#46. Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.

Nick Hornby

#47. 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

#48. There has been an unwise and spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to grow a goatee, hence a fluffy little tuft of something or other, just underneath the centre of his lower lip, that any mother would want to rub off with a bit of spit.

Nick Hornby

#49. I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby

#51. 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

#52. Books are, let's face it better then everything else

Nick Hornby

#53. I loved them, and would always love them. But there was no place where they could fit anymore, so I had nowhere to put all the things I felt. I didn't know what to do with them, and they didn't know what to do with me, and isn't that just like life?

Nick Hornby

#54. She thought I was ... soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby

#56. He was thinking about Edith. She was constantly on the verge of canceling their marriage. She would only commission a few shows at a time, reluctantly, and if he had listened properly, she'd always been telling him that it would all end one day.

Nick Hornby

#57. Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.

Nick Hornby

#58. How do people cope? Do you have to go? What happens if you refuse on the grounds of it being just too fucking grim?

Nick Hornby

#59. He had to say that the thing he found most attractive about her was that she had tried to kill herself. Now that was interesting
sexy, almost, in a morbid kind of way.

Nick Hornby

#60. 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.

Nick Hornby

#61. 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

#62. Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.

Nick Hornby

#63. The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something.

Nick Hornby

#64. (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

#65. Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Nick Hornby

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.

Nick Hornby

#69. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby

#71. Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection?

Nick Hornby

#72. Zaid's finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more."
That's me! And you, probably! That's us!

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby

#74. If you've found the right person, you've found the right person, it doesn't matter how old you are.

Nick Hornby

#75. In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn.

Nick Hornby

#76. 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.

Nick Hornby

#77. 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

#78. Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.

Nick Hornby

#79. I'd never really had arguments like this before, arguments I couldn't understand properly, arguments where both sides were right and wrong all at the same time.

Nick Hornby

#80. 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

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

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby

#83. She wanted to be given a funny script so that she could make it funnier.

Nick Hornby

#84. Anyone who thinks text messages are funny isn't going to kill himself. There isn't enough going on internally.

Nick Hornby

#85. People go on about the first time being important, but it's the second time that really matters. Or the second person, anyway.

Nick Hornby

#86. And if I went
back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in
an old people's home, I wouldn't worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would
be over. And I wouldn't even have had to kill myself.

Nick Hornby

#87. 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

#88. It made him different, and because he was different he felt uncomfortable, and because he felt uncomfortable he could feel himself floating away for everyone and everything.

Nick Hornby

#89. I don't know why you'd want to have sex with me one nightand sleep on the sofa the next," she said.
Well, of course,they weren't consecutive nights," he said.

Nick Hornby

#90. He knew he had only himself to blame; but it was more or less entirely her fault.

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby

#92. 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

#93. He was disappointed that he'd never quite added up to as much as the results of his own calculations. The trouble was that he'd got his sums all wrong, but she didn't want to be the one to tell him that.

Nick Hornby

#94. You know the worst thing about
being rejected? The lack of control. If I could only control the when and how of being dumped by
somebody, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn't be rejection, would it? It
would be by mutual consent.

Nick Hornby

#95. Don't think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them, and we never value things that come easy to us.

Nick Hornby

#96. This thing about looking for someone less different ... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

Nick Hornby

#97. Needless to say, drink, drugs, food, and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you've got literature?

Nick Hornby

#98. When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.

Nick Hornby

#99. 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

#100. 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