Quotes from Nick Hornby

Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.' 'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.' 'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.

I see now that dismissing YA books because you're not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you're not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I've discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that's filled with masterpieces I've never heard of.

I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way. They love live but it's all fucked up for them We were up on that roof because we couldn't find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that...It just fucking destroys you, man.

Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad.

about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.

We all spend so much time, not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're too desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move.

I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.

when she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion... it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.

You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all.

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.

He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?

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.

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

You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.

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

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.

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.

This is the second Simply Red song on this tape. One's unforgivable. Two's a war crime. Can I fast-forward?

In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn.

You can find people. It's like those acrobatic displays.... Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn't really matter who they are, as long as they're there and you don't let them go away without finding someone else.

And it's not like you never do anything wrong ever, is it?' said Marcus. 'I mean...' He had to be careful here. He knew he couldn't say too much or even anything at all about the hospital stuff. 'I mean how come I got to know Will in the first place?' Because you threw a bloody great baguette at a duck's head and killed it, basically,' said Will.

I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.

We can't go on apologizing all our lives, you know.