Nick Hornby Quotes

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

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.

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.

For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

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.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.

Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.

I couldn’t bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.

No man is an island.

When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.

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

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.

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.

Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

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

I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened — I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.

Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.

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.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone

...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.

You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.

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.

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

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.

The trouble with history is that there are too many people involved

It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.

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.

It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.

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

The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.

We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice.