Nick Quotes

The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.

Instead of taking full advantage of having eight women at once, I spent all my time trying to find a real girlfriend.

Someone suggested the Kaiser Chiefs while we were looking for a band name. We had so many ideas ourselves, at least one of us had said no to every idea except Kaiser Chiefs.

We only came up with the Kaiser Chiefs about a year and a half ago when we scrapped every song we'd ever done. It was a complete change of direction, songs, outlook and everything.

There's not much radio in the UK, really. In America, you're in a car, factory, wherever, and you turn the dial on the radio, and can hear about a million stations. Hardly any in England.

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.

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.