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Nick Hornby Quotes

Nick Hornby quote from classy quote

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Heroin Humanity Love Poetry

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Humour Love Romance

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

Nick Hornby Hard Life Problems Starting Over

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...

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Happiness Life Survival

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Adversity Depression Hard Times Inspirational Life

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

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Friends Life

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

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby A Long Way Down Life Sad Sadness

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books Humor Reading

The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Life Music Pop Romance Sadness

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Death

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

Nick Hornby Humor Poetry

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Dickens Humor Writing

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Editing Humor Work Writing

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Literature Reading Science Writing

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Art Religion

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

Nick Hornby Films Music Relationships

I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Relationships

A while back, when Dick & Barry & I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you *are* like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for potential partners, a 2 or 3 page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended: a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time... But there was an important & essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and 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

Nick Hornby Books Movies Music Relationships

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

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby About A Boy Change Nick Hornby Relationships

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

Nick Hornby Juliet Naked Relationships

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby About A Boy Nick Hornby Relationships

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Dating Interests Relationships

But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Humor Relationships

This time, something different happens, though. It’s the daydreaming that does it. I’m doing the usualthing—imagining in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship, from first kiss, to bed, to moving intogether, to getting married (in the past I have even organized the track listing of the party tapes), to howpretty she’ll look when she’s pregnant, to names of children—until suddenly I realize that there’snothing left to actually, like, happen. I’ve done it all, lived through the whole relationship in my head.I’ve watched the film on fast-forward; I know the whole plot, the ending, all the good bit. Now I’ve gotto rewind and watch it all over again in real time, and where’s the fun in that?And fucking … when’s it all going to fucking stop? I’m going to jump from rock to rock for the rest ofmy life until there aren’t any rocks left? I’m going to run each time I get itchy feet? Because I get themabout once a quarter, along with the utilities bills. More than that, even, during British Summer Time.I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you andme, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Overthinking Relationships

Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.' 'Too stupid.' 'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?' 'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.' 'Exactly.' 'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought. 'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Depression Humor Life Lessons Simplicity Suicide

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

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Time

Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get the highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kabab shop on Hornsey road - nothing. He'd tried to read Nicky's thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week - nothing. It really annoyed him that the only thing he'd ever achieved through trying was something he hadn't really wanted to do that much in the first place. And anyway, since when did hitting a bird with a sandwich ever kill it? People spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Dead Duck Funny

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

Nick Hornby Books Identity Individuality

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

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books Marriage Reading

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books Reading

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

Nick Hornby Books Reading

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

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books Reading

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books Culture Humor Love Of Reading Reading Sports

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Books Cataloging Libraries Organization

There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Fear Life Life And Living Living Living Life Living Life To The Fullest Suicide

Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.' 'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.' 'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Action Effort Friendship Hornby

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby About A Boy Love Lucky Nick Hornby People

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.

~ Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby High Fidelity Hornby Humor Humour Man Manliness Manly Men Nick Nick Hornby Sex
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