Nick Hornby Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

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

Nick Hornby
Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.

Nick Hornby
Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

Nick Hornby
No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there's always something to be learned. It's just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

Nick Hornby
But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.

Nick Hornby
I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

Nick Hornby
I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?

Nick Hornby
I'd stay there, or not, and I'd eat, or not, and I'd drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn't do wouldn't matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.

Nick Hornby
Just because it's a relationship, and it's based on soppy stuff, it doesn't mean you can't make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you'll never get anywhere. That's where I've been going wrong. I've been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.

Nick Hornby
It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

Nick Hornby
The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads.

Nick Hornby
It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead

Nick Hornby
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
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
Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world's leading homeopathic 'scientists', now claims that you can email homeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the 'memory' of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right?

Nick Hornby
I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. Just once. I know I'm not born to run, I know that Seven Sisters' Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can't be different, can they?

Nick Hornby
Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having--a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say....

Nick Hornby
I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgement. The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be.

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

Nick Hornby