Quotes from Nick Hornby

The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn't; as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self confident and I am incontinent... they have opinions and I have lists.

And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.

There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar.

It's easier to have parents if you've got a girlfriend.

You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie. 'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.' 'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.' 'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife.

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

Laura says - Everybody's faith needs testing from time to time, I thought it would be amusing to introduce you to someone with a Tina Turner album, and see whether you still felt the same. Rob reflects - ...tonight, I have to confess (but only to myself) that maybe, given the right set of peculiar, freakish, probably unrepeatable circumstances, it's not what you like but what you're like that's important.

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. Always tell your kids they have siblings... He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

Do I want to be like him? Not really, I don't think. But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I'm unhappy, or whether I'm unhappy because I like.

You'd think that even a bad doctor on a bad day would feel better than a good drug dealer on a good day, but I suspect that this might not be true. I suspect that drug dealers have days when everything clicks, and it's all buzz buzz buzz, and they chalk off their jobs one by one, and they return home with a sense of accomplishment.

When I went back into the kitchen, I wanted to sit on my mum's lap. I know that sounds stupid and babyish , but I couldn't help it. On my sixteenth birthday, I didn't want to be sixteen, or fifteen or anyteen. I wanted to be three or four, and too young to make any kind of mess

I couldn't bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.

I'm still pretty sick about what I've lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I'm not the best sleeper.

Few of us have chosen our clubs, they have simply been presented to us; and so as they slip from Second Division to the Third, or sell their best players, or buy players who you know can't play, or bash the ball the seven hundreth time towards a nine foot centre-forward, we simply curse, go home, worry for a fortnight and then come back to suffer all over again.

We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?

Read anything, as long as you can't wait to pick it up again.

Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends, it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was reciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out.

No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there's always something to be learned. It's just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

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

I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically.

Is there anything more adult than sticking with a relationship that's falling apart in the hope that you can put it right? I've never done that in my life.

It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are suppose to go.

Zaid's finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more. That's me! And you, probably! That's us!