Top 331 Quotes & Sayings by Nick Hornby - Page 2

I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh.

It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were.

Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.

I can remember my father gave me a huge history of football for my 12th birthday - I used to read that a lot. I can remember thinking it was cool that something I was interested in even had a history. Most things I loved didn't.

I think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way.

Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives.

At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times.

I miss independent record stores very much.

The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen.

I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success.

The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.

You can't really ask for anything more than to be working for your entire life - and to be doing something that some people respond to.

I used to go and see the Clash a fair bit. I did think they were dead cool, and very handsome.

I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language.

I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life.

I think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless.

We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.

If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.

I'd say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college.

I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance.

The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore.

I think I became less literary after I sold more!

It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that.

With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made.

A lot of what 'Funny Girl' is about, for me, is the experience feeling very happy doing a certain thing with a certain group of people. That partly came about because of having really positive experiences writing movies.

Football really felt like a private thing when I was in my teens because it wasn't on television, for a start, apart from 'Match of the Day.'

Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty.

Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment.

The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.

I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home.

I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right.

If you're 22 and got everything you want, what are you going to write about for the rest of your life?

It seems to me quite often that the journeys of young women are more moving because they are hemmed in more, and dramatically it's more interesting to think about and write about people whose lives are circumscribed in some way.

There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.

Screenwriting is about condensing.

I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.

The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir.

Home was extremely normal. But my dad's life was quite exotic, really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home.

There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.'

I applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once.

Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one.

I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did.

My relationships are fairly stable.

I've never met anyone who is seriously bad.

All the Oscars stuff for 'An Education' was incredibly exciting, especially because it was such an underdog project - no one would give us the money for it, and we all nearly gave up because it wasn't getting anywhere, then suddenly a breakthrough and this really lovely film, which then took on a life of its own.

I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.

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.

Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.

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.

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.

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

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.

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

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.