Quotes from Nick Hornby

It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

This, really, is the bottom line, the chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads. I'm not going back there again; I'd rather stay in for the rest of my life than attract that kind of attention.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter—there's a lot of erasing and rethinking

I can't tell you how good and bad I felt. Yes I can: I felt like a baked Alaska.

They're all tossers, aren't they, men like Martin. They think women are like fucking laptops or whatever, like, my old one's knackered and anyway, you can get ones that are slimmer and do more stuff now.

There was the same need for obscurity, the same suspicion that if a piece of music had reached a large number of people, it had somehow been drained of its worth.

Everyone knows the song that Millwall fans sing, to the tune of "Sailing": 'No one likes us/No one likes us/No one likes us/We don't care.' In fact I have always felt that the song is a little melodramatic, and that if anyone should sing it, it is Arsenal. Every Arsenal fan, the youngest and the oldest, is aware that no one likes us, and every day we hear that dislike reiterated.

When I'm arguing with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I'm going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. This is *really* who I am, I'll tell him.

from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens) In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.

he was disappointed that he'd never quite added up to as much as the results of his own calculations. The trouble was that he'd got his sums all wrong, but she didn't want to be the one to tell him that.

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions.

Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting.

What was happening here? He decided that children were what was happening here; that children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously there would have been none. Maybe children democratized beautiful single women.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that there was this time--maybe it was a day, maybe a few days, I can't remember now--when everything seemed to have come together. And so obviously it was time to go and screw it all up.

Marcus was difficult simply because he frequently gave the impression that he was merely stopping off on this planet on his way to somewhere else, somewhere he might fit in better.

sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful at the same time.

He was hoping that when this was all over, his spiritual overdraft would have been paid off, and he'd be allowed to use the cash machine again.

But somehow, there's less time to think since she came back. We're too busy talking, or working, or having sex (there's a lot of sex at the moment, much of it initiated by me as a way of banishing insecurity), or eating, or going to the pictures. Maybe I should stop doing these things, so as I can work it all out properly, because I know these things are important times. But then again, maybe I shouldn't; maybe this is how it's done. Maybe this is how people manage to have relationships.

So, as she walked down the stairs into the club, she was looking forward to a seething, teeming, wriggling, wiggling throng of dancers, many of whom she'd recognize: she wanted to see former pupils, local shopkeepers, museum regulars, all of whom would look at her as if to say, Here we are! What kept you?

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

She didn't think she'd ever shown enough gratitude for the quick wits of the people she worked with, and if the evening ever ended, which it showed no signs of doing, she would rectify that. She would buy them all flowers or whisky and write a card thanking them for being so clever.

Needless to say, drink, drugs, food, and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you've got literature?

See, I've always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things.

I had discovered after the Swindon game that loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with. Marriages are nowhere near as rigid - you won't catch any Arsenal fans slipping off to Tottenham for a bit of extra-marital slap and tickle, and though divorce is a possibility (you can just stop going if things get too bad), getting hitched again is out of the question.