Nick Hornby Quotes - Page 7

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Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.

Nick Hornby

Book, Momentum, Mouths

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I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!

Nick Hornby

Smart, Book, People

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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. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn some of my living as a critic – maybe it’s those voices I can hear when I write. ‘You’re a WANKER, X.’ ‘The Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should give that to me for having to read you.

Nick Hornby

Football, Book, Writing

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

Nick Hornby

Truth Will Set You Free, Noses, Confessing

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I really don't want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!

Nick Hornby

Book, Want, Boring

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Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am.

Nick Hornby

Men, Thinking, Worst Enemy

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.131, Penguin

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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.

Nick Hornby

Awkward, Flesh, Threatening

"High Fidelity". Book by Nick Hornby, 1995.

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But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

Nick Hornby

Powerful, Creating, Years

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Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?

Nick Hornby

Sleep, Dark, Years

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

Nick Hornby

Scratches, Crosses, Morphine

Nick Hornby (2009). “Juliet, Naked”, p.86, Penguin UK

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My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.

Nick Hornby

Fashion, Gay, Hair

"A Long Way Down". Book by Nick Hornby, June 7, 2005.

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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

Football, Falling In Love, Pain

"Fever Pitch: A Fan's Life". Book by Nick Hornby, 1992.

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It takes a child to say the unsayable.

Nick Hornby

Children

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Clockers" asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading "Clockers" by Richard Price)

Nick Hornby

Reading, Heart, Interesting

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So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

Nick Hornby

Book, Reading, Cat

Nick Hornby (2006). “The complete polysyllabic spree”

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

Nick Hornby

People, Want, Really Sad

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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

Heart, Talking, Years

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No man is an island.

Nick Hornby

Men, Islands

"About a Boy". www.imdb.com. 2002.

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contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

Nick Hornby

War, Fighting, Reykjavik

Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

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All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.

Nick Hornby

Brother, Book, Reading

Nick Hornby (2006). “Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt”, McSweeneys Books

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I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.

Nick Hornby

Girl, Book, Mean

"High Fidelity". www.imdb.com. 2000.

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

Nick Hornby

Phones, Numbers, People

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.85, Penguin

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You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.

Nick Hornby

Flower, Kissing, Color

Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.62, Penguin

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And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

Nick Hornby

Fun, Book, Letters

"Stuff I’ve Been Reading". www.believermag.com. October 2005.

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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

Book, Mean, Achieve

Nick Hornby (2008). “Shakespeare Wrote for Money”, McSweeneys Books

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Born: April 17, 1957
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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