Nick Hornby Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

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

Nick Hornby
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
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
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.

Nick Hornby
Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Nick Hornby
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
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
I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

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

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

Nick Hornby
For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

Nick Hornby
I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains.

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

Nick Hornby
By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.

Nick Hornby
And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile alot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody.

Nick Hornby
As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive.

Nick Hornby
Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.

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

Nick Hornby
You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?

Nick Hornby
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
I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it sometime. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes.

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

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
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
And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.

Nick Hornby
A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You've got to kick off with a killer, to grab the attention. Then you've got to take it up a notch, or cool it off a notch.... Oh, there are a lot of rules.

Nick Hornby
These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and... and it was too late.

Nick Hornby
Then I lost it. Kinda lost it all, you know. Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds.

Nick Hornby