Nick Hornby
37 quotes
Biography
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900."
"You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended."
"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."
"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 are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too."
"Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax."
"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."
"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."
"By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do."
"As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive."