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Nick Hornby Quotes

Nicholas Peter John Hornby is an English writer and lyricist. He is best known for his memoir Fever Pitch and novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, all of which were adapted into feature films. Hornby's work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide as of 2018. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Hornby was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. April 1957  •  Other names نیک هورن‌بای
Nick Hornby photo

Works

High Fidelity
High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
A Long Way Down
Nick Hornby
How to Be Good
How to Be Good
Nick Hornby
High Fidelity
High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
A Long Way Down
Nick Hornby
How to Be Good
How to Be Good
Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby: 110 quotes8 likes

Famous Nick Hornby Quotes

“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.”

Nick Hornby book Juliet, Naked

Source: Juliet, Naked

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

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

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

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“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 book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

“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 book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“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.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

Nick Hornby Quotes about love

“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 book How to Be Good

Variant: 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.
Source: How to Be Good

“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

“[…] 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 About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

“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 Fever Pitch

Source: Fever Pitch (1992)

“It's love this and love that but of couse it's so easy to love someone you don't know, whether it's George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you've ever shared Christmas turkey- now there's a miracle.”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

“See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I’m looking for someone, and before I know it I’ve
found her.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

Nick Hornby Quotes about life

“… So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”

Nick Hornby Fever Pitch

Source: Fever Pitch

“Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.”

Nick Hornby

“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.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“… 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.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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.”

Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby: Trending quotes

“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.”

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 book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

Nick Hornby Quotes

“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 book Songbook

Source: Songbook

“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.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

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

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“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.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

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

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

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

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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 book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“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.”

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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 book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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 book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“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.”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

“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.”

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy (1998), Ch. 3

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

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

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

Nick Hornby Fever Pitch

Source: Fever Pitch

“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.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“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.”

Nick Hornby

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

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

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

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

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

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“Human beings are millions of things in one day.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“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”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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.”

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

“I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.”

Nick Hornby Fever Pitch

Source: Fever Pitch

“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.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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.”

Nick Hornby book Juliet, Naked

Source: Juliet, Naked

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

Nick Hornby book The Polysyllabic Spree

Source: The Polysyllabic Spree

“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?”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“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.”

Nick Hornby book Juliet, Naked

Source: Juliet, Naked

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

Nick Hornby book Slam

Source: Slam

“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.”

Nick Hornby book Slam

Source: Slam

“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.”

Nick Hornby book Juliet, Naked

Source: Juliet, Naked

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

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

“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.”

Nick Hornby book The Polysyllabic Spree

Source: The Polysyllabic Spree

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

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

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

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

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

Nick Hornby book Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

Source: Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

“It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

“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”

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

“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 About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

“So now what? What happens when words fail us?”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

“The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.”

Nick Hornby

“And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.”

Nick Hornby

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