Nick Hornby quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Nick Hornby on Wise Famous Quotes.

I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.

So now what? What happens when words fail us?

Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money.

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.

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

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

Can I be a good person and spend that much money on overpriced consumer goods? I don't know. But I do know this: I'd be no good without them.

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.

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

I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?

We can't go on apologizing all our lives, you know.

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.

The anger was clearly real, though. It was in there, sloshing around, looking for the nearest hole to escape through.

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

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

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

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

Is that thing actually going round? I can't tell

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

Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry.

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

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

What harm has he ever done to you?'
'You know what harm he's done me. He offended me with his terrible taste.

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

One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.

I am cowed - by her intelligence, and her ferocity, and the way she's always right. Or at least, she's always right enough to shut me up. 5.

I have made myself more complicated than I really am.

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

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

Sensitive people find it harder to stick around.

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.

For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal's moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own

There aren't too many candlelit dinners and second honeymoons, I can tell you. We're beyond all that. We're good friends more than anything.

One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.

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

When your sad
like really sad
you only want to be with other people who are sad.

Easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret.

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

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.

These things are going to eat away at me ... I rewrite the script in my head until it's 100-proof poison, and none of it helps at all.

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

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

Well, I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song.

What went wrong? Nothing and everything.

You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.

I'll have got him out of my system." "I hope not." "Really?" "What would there be left of you, if you did?

It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.

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

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.

... it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Read what you enjoy, not what bores you.

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

There aren't any buts," said Bill. "That's the whole point of being a writer, isn't it? If I wanted buts, I'd go and work in a fucking but factory.

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.

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not.

I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.

Being a freak isn't the same thing as having a talent.

No one's stopping you," said Jess. "But you've got to make it more interesting. That's why why we drift off and talk about biscuits.

Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented.

She of all people knows what compilation tapes represent.

You're my easy life option. The moment you stop being that, you're no option at all.

I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

If, during his engagement to Edith, someone had tried to explain how lonely marriage could be, he wouldn't have believed it.

It's not reading and whatever that makes you good or bad. It's whether you rape people, or get addicted to crack and go out mugging.

Is it possible to want to divorce a man simply because he doesn't want to be rude about Ginger Spice? I rather fear it might be.

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.

Seeing as he wasn't very bright, I was pretty sure that he was going to be good at fighting.

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.

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?

Does that help? Probably not, unless you are sane enough to believe that the truth about anyone is disappointing, the truth about me especially so.

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

It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

I hate time. It never does what you want it to.

It's easier to have parents if you've got a girlfriend.

Why should we be denied basic human rights just because we've messed up our relationships?

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.

He'd still be who he was, and that, it seemed to him, was the basic problem.

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

The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Human beings are millions of things in one day.

Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.

Clive was rapidly coming to the conclusion that being engaged to somebody meant that he spent an awful lot of time not doing things he wanted to do.

I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.

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

He was hoping that when this was all over, his spiritual overdraft would have been paid off, and he'd be allowed to use the cash machine again.

My friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.

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

Fuck. I hate all this stuff. How old do you have to get before it stops?

When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Sitting at the table with the kids, and being told off like a kid, has liberated me; my disenfranchisement has empowered me.

I have a really low boredom threshold.

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.