Nick Hornby Quotes

Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started o...

Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world...

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at th...

It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that...

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look...

We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all ...

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

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not.

It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part o...

It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree viole...

You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact abo...

It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint in...

And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, ...

I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading somethin...

Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.

He's a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much o...

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting...

When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but that's like an emotive word, "stalker", isn't it...

I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to...

And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too da...

Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been u...

Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.

I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someon...

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, ...

When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for th...

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

You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?" Seeing someone else? How on earth could that explain any of...

Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the neare...

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a ta...

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to wher...

Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State B...

I could feel the weight of everything then --- the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone...

There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that ou...

[about suicide] And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going...

All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why peop...

You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You hav...

Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or...

I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know if your happ...

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

Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize...

he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like t...

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 e...

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a ...

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all th...

Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or w...

Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a pie...

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killin...

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, ...

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it...

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, ...

For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal's moods and fortunes...

[H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to s...

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncr...

It would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more ...

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

I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the ki...

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are t...

when she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, inv...

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

I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became stu...

One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be a...

Some of my favorite songs: 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' by Neil Young; 'Last Night I Dreamed Tha...

Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unles...

What was in it for me? I wasn't asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didn't she want...

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I mi...

A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to h...

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are t...

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

What did I think I was doing? What did she think she was doing? When I want to kiss people in that w...

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what y...

Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me...

I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books li...

This time, something different happens, though. It’s the daydreaming that does it. I’m doing the usu...

Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the ...

Read any women's magazine and you'll see the same complaint over and over again: men - those little ...

What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was...

But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don...

A while back, when Dick & Barry & I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you *...

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that...

The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and...

Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days...

The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I...

Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then...

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, wh...

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the ...

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

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longe...

That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to fli...

So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right t...

The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That’s what the whole thing is about. And we can’...

The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science an...

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need ...

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we...

And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about...

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a reco...

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It...

She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything