Quotes from Nick Hornby

We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other's bottoms, and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.

What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? 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.

I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at nay time of the day r year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they've come to represent the trumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain.

Why should we be denied basic human rights just because we've messed up our relationships?

Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by.

Like most depressions that plague people who have been more fortunate than most, I was ashamed of mine because there appeared to me no convincing cause for it; I just felt as though I had come off the rails somewhere.

He'd still be who he was, and that, it seemed to him, was the basic problem.

The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.

What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad, and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but "love" would have to do for now.

In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material.

I'd never really had arguments like this before, arguments I couldn't understand properly, arguments where both sides were right and wrong all at the same time.

She began to fear that she would always be greedy, all the time. Nothing ever seemed to fill her up. Nothing ever seemed to touch the sides.

because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you're prepared to go that extra two inches, and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different -- oh, I would have done it if she hadn't been there or he hadn't been there or if someone hadn't sat on my head -- but that fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we'd all had ample opportunity not to be.

I hope that when people are happy together, it feels as though someone keeps piling seconds and thirds on their plates.

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.

Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.

I'd saw there were millions like me, but there aren't, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don't read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen.

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.

opinion. Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn't tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her.

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Ho da poco scoperto che la mia amica Mary, quando finisce un libro, fa passare qualche giorno prima di cominciarne un altro - vuole dare all'ultima lettura un po' più di respiro, prima che venga soffocata dalla prossima. È una cosa sensata, e mi sembra una linea di comportamento assolutamente lodevole. Noi che leggiamo nevroticamente, tuttavia - per scongiurare la noia e il timore dell'ignoranza e della nostra morte imminente - non possiamo permetterci di farlo.

it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on.

They're not me, but I wish I was them. Maybe not them, exactly, because they're not so happy either. But I wish I was one of those people, the people who know what to say, the people who can't see the difference. Because it seems to me that you have more chance of being able to live a life you can stand if you're like that.

I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: she hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.