Quotes from Nick Hornby

Sorry Maureen.

But I didn't know where I wanted to go. Or what I wanted to do when I got there. I had dreams, but they were vague things with no real substance. I wanted to be famous, or really rich, or wildly successful, but that was as far as the dream went. My whole life was a fill-in-the-blank.

I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.

He wanted Rachel to be his wife, his lover, the centre of his whole world; a girlfriend implied that he would see her from time to time, that she would have some kind of independent existence away from him, and he didn't want that at all.

I could feel the weight of everything then --- the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat the world record for falling off a tower block.

This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was a Dutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack, attackers to play in mid-field; it was football's version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it.

he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...

And she liked me. She liked me . She liked me. She liked me. Or at least, I think she did. I think she did. Etc.

Most days, for the last dozen or so years, I attributed to Charlie, or at least to our breakup, most things that have gone wrong for me. Like: I wouldn't have packed in college; I wouldn't have gone to work in Record and Tape; I wouldn't have had an unsatisfactory personal life. This is the woman who broke my heart, who ruined my life, this woman is single-handedly responsible for my poverty and directionlessness and failure, the woman I dreamed about regularly for a good five years.

The annoying thing about reading is that you can never get the job done.

So the whole conversation is going right off course. It's like a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, because all the time I'm thinking, this should be easy to push along, and everything I say just takes me in the wrong direction.

What was in it for me? I wasn't asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didn't she want her erogenous zones stimulated? I have no idea. All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Trojan.

In other words, it is impossible: we cannot function properly, and the evening ends in confusion and awkwardness, and very early.

The trouble with influential books is that if you have absorbed the influence without ever reading the original, then it can sometimes be hard to appreciate the magnitude of its achievement.

some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.

Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.

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 ground that you're not a policeman or a dangerous criminal...The world suddenly seems a larger place.

I don't have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don't think jokes even belong in proper books. I won't bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.

Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry.

When someone uses the phrase 'the prick one', and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word 'metaphorically', you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.

Is it possible to want to divorce a man simply because he doesn't want to be rude about Ginger Spice? I rather fear it might be.

His father fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.

that night taught me one of life's most useful lessons, one of the only pieces of advice I have to offer to younger generations: YOU'RE ALLOWED TO WALK OUT!

You're my easy life option. The moment you stop being that, you're no option at all.