Nick Hornby: Likeness

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?'

Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.”

“[…] 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.”

“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like”

“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.”

“It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead”

“Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.”

“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.”

“Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.”

“I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers' Hose, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof, but I didn't blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me?”

“Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax.”

“What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?”