Quotes from Nick Hornby

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.

Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person.

Screenwriting is about condensing.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

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.

With 'Brooklyn,' I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I just had a very strong sense that if I turned the volume up a little bit, it could be something really special.

Jeremy Corbyn has proved popular with young voters in part because he has promised an end to austerity.

In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.

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.

Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.

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.

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.

When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.

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

I can see that now. I can see everything once it's already happened — I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

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

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

The trouble with history is that there are too many people involved

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.

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

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

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

The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are.