Nick Hornby Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.

Nick Hornby
The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

Nick Hornby
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
Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.

Nick Hornby
Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am...

Nick Hornby
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.

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

Nick Hornby
I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

Nick Hornby
I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.

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

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

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
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