Nick Hornby Quotes

Quotes about:

Age Art Books Children Emotions Failing Feelings

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.

Nick Hornby

Giving, Records, Stores

54 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Book, Self, Expression

Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

59 Copy quote
I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.

Nick Hornby

Book, Self, Expression

Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

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

Nick Hornby

Alive, Bad Times, Good Things

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

Nick Hornby

Long Way Down, Know How, Knows

22 Copy quote
It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

Nick Hornby

Important

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.291, Penguin

4 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Home, People, Chemistry

"High Fidelity". www.imdb.com. 2000.

37 Copy quote
I never really recovered from the shock of discovering that women do what we do; they save their best pairs for the nights when they are going to sleep with somebody. When you live with a woman, these faded, shrunken tatty scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house; your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you are surrounded by exotic lingerie for ever and ever amen...those dreams crumble to dust.

Nick Hornby

Dream, Sleep, Night

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.57, Penguin

10 Copy quote
We had no irony when it came to girls, though. There was just no time to develop it. One moment they weren't there, not in any form that interested us, anyway, and the next you couldn't miss them; they were everywhere, all over the place. One moment you wanted to clonk them on the head for being your sister, or someone else's sister, and the next you wanted to....actually, we didn't know what we wanted next, but it was something. Almost overnight, all these sisters (there was no other kind of girl, not yet)had become interesting, disturbing, even.

Nick Hornby

Girl, Interesting, Missing

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.16, Penguin

4 Copy quote
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

Music, Song, Pain

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.36, Penguin

20 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Book, Important, Trying

25 Copy quote
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

Hopeful, Way, Sentimental

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.74, Penguin

21 Copy quote
It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.

Nick Hornby

Girl, Boys, Adults

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.262, Penguin

7 Copy quote
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

Memories, Emotion, Ends

18 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Relationship, Boyfriend, Husband

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.128, Penguin

24 Copy quote
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

Romance, Dip, Metaphor

Nick Hornby (2003). “Songbook”, p.52, Penguin

5 Copy quote
What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

Nick Hornby

Music, Records, Firsts

35 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Needs, Dramatic, Being Human

"How does it feel to be a woman? First, the Good News..." by Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. May 27, 2001.

20 Copy quote
For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

Nick Hornby

Average, Fever Pitch, Moron

"Fever Pitch". Book by Nick Hornby, 1992.

40 Copy quote
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

Party, Home, Tired

Nick Hornby (1999). “About a Boy”, p.65, Penguin

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

Nick Hornby

Home, Lunch, Victory

5 Copy quote
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

Live Life, Heart, Kids

4 Copy quote
Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.

Nick Hornby

Beautiful, Song, Couple

Nick Hornby (2003). “31 songs”, Viking Books

19 Copy quote
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

Heart, Thinking, Remember

4 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Plot, Popcorn, Credit

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.34, Penguin

14 Copy quote

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Born: April 17, 1957
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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