Nick Hornby Quotes

I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.

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

You can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you.

I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!

Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.

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

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

He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.

There's no doubt that he's the biggest sports star in the world now. (on David Beckham)

I really don't want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

I'd thought I'd live with my wife, but I couldn't find one.

It's no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won't find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.

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.

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.

For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.

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

I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.

I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?

…I've had a bad week." What's happened?" Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.

It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

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

I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal.

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

What harm has he ever done to you?' 'You know what harm he's done me. He offended me with his terrible taste.

You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.

Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.

Reading begets reading.

What went wrong? Nothing and everything.

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

You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.

I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.

It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.

Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.

He's a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones.

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...

Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not.

For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal's moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own

Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.

So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.