Quotes from Nick Hornby

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners.

How come every squitty little shitty snotty bastard knows my name?

How do people cope? Do you have to go? What happens if you refuse on the grounds of it being just too fucking grim?

It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.

And it's not that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live any more. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home.

If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements..

It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer?

It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.

I know, despite all the gloom and self-doubt that bubbles up from the deep when you get dumped, that you did not represent my last and best chance of a relationship. So, you know. Nice try. Close, but no cigar. See you around.

It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.

I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the wold until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.

She was the spare room that never got tidied, the e-mail that never got answered, the loan that never got repaid, the symptom that never got described to a doctor.

When I look at my sins (and if I think they're sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it's not the Christianity that is so alluring; it's the rebirth. Because who wouldn't wish to start all over again?

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.

I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow.

These things are going to eat away at me... I rewrite the script in my head until it's 100-proof poison, and none of it helps at all.

What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.

Someone like my mum would say, Oh, you're just a kid, you don't know what love is.But I didn't think of anything else apart from being with Alicia, and the only time I felt like I was where I wanted to be was when I was with her. I mean, that may as well be love, mightn't it?

Because it's a brilliant film. It's funny, and violent, and it's got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in it, and everything. And a cracking sound track. Maybe there's no comparison between Ian sleeping with Laura and Reservoir Dogs after all. Ian hasn't got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in him. And Ian's not funny. Or violent. And he's got a crap sound track, judging from what we used to hear through the ceiling. I've taken this as far as it will go.

He wasn't Ringo, though. He was more like Paul. Maureen was Ringo, except she wasn't very funny. I was George, except I wasn't shy, or spiritual. Martin was John, except he wasn't talented or cool. Thinking about it, maybe we were more like another group with four people in it.

If the price you have to pay for a sin is so high that you end up wanting to kill yourself and committing suicide is an even worse sin, then Someone's done his sums wrong. Someone's overcharging.

She wasn't the sort of catch one could take home and show off to people; she was the sort of catch that drags the angler off the end of the pier and pulls him out to sea before tearing him to pieces as he's drowning. He shouldn't have been fishing at all, not when he was so ill-equipped.

And I have to say, books haven't helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there's always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is… Well, it's just you. And when you go, it's gone. Nothing abstract about it.

This is how I feel, every day, and people don't want to know that. They want to know that I'm feeling what Tom Jones makes you feel. Or that Australian girl who used to be in Neighbours. But I feel like this, and they won't play what I feel on the radio, because people that are sad don't fit in.