Nick Hornby Quotes - Page 7

Quotes about:

Age Art Books Children Emotions Failing Feelings

I have always been accused of taking the things I love – football, of course, but also books and records – much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn some of my living as a critic – maybe it’s those voices I can hear when I write. ‘You’re a WANKER, X.’ ‘The Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should give that to me for having to read you.

Nick Hornby

Football, Book, Writing

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

Nick Hornby

People, Want, Really Sad

4 Copy quote
The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.

Nick Hornby

Song, Past, Thinking

4 Copy quote
Clockers" asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading "Clockers" by Richard Price)

Nick Hornby

Reading, Heart, Interesting

4 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Waiting, Lists, Fiction

4 Copy quote
A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

Nick Hornby

Suicide, Virginia, Orange

4 Copy quote
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

Brother, Book, Reading

Nick Hornby (2006). “Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt”, McSweeneys Books

4 Copy quote
No man is an island.

Nick Hornby

Men, Islands

"About a Boy". www.imdb.com. 2002.

17 Copy quote
...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.

Nick Hornby

Wind, Way, Faces

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.37, Penguin

4 Copy quote
You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.

Nick Hornby

Flower, Kissing, Color

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.62, Penguin

4 Copy quote
We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.

Nick Hornby

Heart, Talking, Years

4 Copy quote
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

War, Fighting, Reykjavik

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

4 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Football, Falling In Love, Pain

"Fever Pitch: A Fan's Life". Book by Nick Hornby, 1992.

44 Copy quote
It takes a child to say the unsayable.

Nick Hornby

Children

4 Copy quote
Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

Nick Hornby

Nice, Stress, Night

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.65, Penguin

4 Copy quote
Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

Nick Hornby

Book, Mean, Achieve

Nick Hornby (2008). “Shakespeare Wrote for Money”, McSweeneys Books

4 Copy quote
You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you.

Nick Hornby

Sorry, People, Asking

4 Copy quote
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.

Nick Hornby

Fun, Book, Letters

"Stuff I’ve Been Reading". www.believermag.com. October 2005.

4 Copy quote
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?

Nick Hornby

Sleep, Dark, Years

4 Copy quote
It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself

Nick Hornby

Christmas, World, Messages

Nick Hornby (1999). “About a Boy”, p.138, Penguin

4 Copy quote
I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.

Nick Hornby

Growing Up, Believe, Adults

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

Nick Hornby

Want, Keep Going

Nick Hornby (1999). “About a Boy”, p.192, Penguin

4 Copy quote
I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.

Nick Hornby

Girl, Book, Mean

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

4 Copy quote
My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.

Nick Hornby

Fashion, Gay, Hair

"A Long Way Down". Book by Nick Hornby, June 7, 2005.

4 Copy quote
my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.

Nick Hornby

Phones, Numbers, People

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.85, Penguin

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Ben Folds

Nick Hornby

Follow

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

Popular Topics