Quotes from Nick Hornby

So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.

Clive was rapidly coming to the conclusion that being engaged to somebody meant that he spent an awful lot of time not doing things he wanted to do.

He could see why his mum chose (italicized) friends, instead of just putting up with anyone she happened to bump into, or sticking with people who supported the same football team, or wore the same clothes, which was pretty much happened at school; his must have conversations like this with Suzie, conversations that moved, conversations where each thing the other person said seemed to lead you on somewhere.

I didn't say anything. But I could have pointed out that most life-changing says happen without your expecting them. I have spent what seems like half my life expecting the worst. And it never happens. But on the day it does, it will knock me flat on my back anyway.

What came first the music or the misery?People worry about kids playing with guns,or watching violent videos,that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about the kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak,rejection,pain,misery and loss.Did i listen to pop music because i was miserable?Or was i miserable because i listened to pop music?

I have made myself more complicated than I really am.

Read what you enjoy, not what bores you.

It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favourite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

I don't know why you'd want to have sex with me one nightand sleep on the sofa the next, she said. Well, of course,they weren't consecutive nights, he said.

It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead.

Tucker, please put him down, said Annie. You're frightening Jackson. He's not, said Jackson. It's cool. I don't like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized.

Influential books are often a disappointment, if they're properly influential, because influence cannot guarantee the quality of the imitators, and your appetite for the original has been partially sated by its poor copies.

Effectively we become the DVD of Elf that you ignore at nine o'clock on a Friday night, on the presumption there will be something better (at least, something more fulfilling, more complex, and that you haven't seen twice before) on the shelves somewhere. And guess what you end up going home with? Well, that's what we are to these beautiful, fantastic women: Elves.

Will hated Christmas, for the obvious reason: people knocked on his door, singing the song he hated more than any song in the world and expected him to give them money.

Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.

Ponekad kondomi stvarno ali stvarno spre?avaju za?e?e. Ukoliko ste lik koji ih uvek nosi sa sobom onda niko ne?e hteti sa vama da spava.

A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I've loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can't believe that there'll be another one. Yet there always is, and I can't wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you've got a life worth living.

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.

And if I went back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in an old people's home, I wouldn't worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would be over. And I wouldn't even have had to kill myself.

I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie.

I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading {literature}, like I did with {a legal thriller} all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading literary novels, do you?

And that's the last time we will ever speak, probably. 'No problem': the last words I will ever say to somebody I have been reasonably close to before our lives take different directions. Weird, eh? You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then, bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins.