Nick Hornby Quotes

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

We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other's bottoms, and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.

I really don't want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!

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

And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because 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.

...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.

Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem…and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto.

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.

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

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Just because it's a relationship, and it's based on soppy stuff, it doesn't mean you can't make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you'll never get anywhere. That's where I've been going wrong. I've been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.

The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.

I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.

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.

Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.

(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.

We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute.

Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of a football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.

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

No man is an island.

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.

...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.

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

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

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.