Nick Hornby Quotes

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?

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.

Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad".

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.

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.

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself

Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.

[H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?

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.

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

What good were real feelings anyway?

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

You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you.

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

It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.

We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?

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

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

He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent.

So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.

Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

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.

She thought I was...soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.

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?

[...] 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.

This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money.

I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.

I have a really low boredom threshold.

It takes a child to say the unsayable.

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.

The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

...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.

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all

Human beings are millions of things in one day.

I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.

So now what? What happens when words fail us?

But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.

On New Year's Eve he ould make a resolution to recover some his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at people even if he disapproved of them

If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.