Nick Hornby Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

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
There are many differences between a baby and an iPod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby.

Nick Hornby
I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.

Nick Hornby
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
I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

Nick Hornby
Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.

Nick Hornby
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
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

Nick Hornby
Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it's weird, then, that it's the only thing which can make me feel like a ten-year-old.

Nick Hornby
[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

Nick Hornby
I love the relationship that anyone has with music... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out.... It's the best part of us probably...

Nick Hornby
That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

Nick Hornby
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
What came first — the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

Nick Hornby
I am not saying that the anally retentive woman does not exist, but she is vastly outnumbered by her masculine equivalent; and while there are women with obsessions, they are usually, I think, obsessive about people, or the focus for their obsession changes frequently.

Nick Hornby
When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world — reading, eating, sleeping — has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

Nick Hornby
Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.

Nick Hornby
Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with.... The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy.

Nick Hornby
Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.

Nick Hornby
Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn't — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin's wonderfully greasy sax.

Nick Hornby
One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.

Nick Hornby
I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.

Nick Hornby
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
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