Nick Hornby Quotes - Page 8

Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it's hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive.

We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other's bottoms, and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.

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

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.

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.

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.

What good were real feelings anyway?

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

I have a really low boredom threshold.

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.

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you can hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling about. [...] But what can you do about it? We don’t choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

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

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

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

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.

Human beings are millions of things in one day.

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

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

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

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.

Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having - a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say.

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.

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.