Quotes from Nick Hornby

I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh.

We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.

I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.

One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time.

When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.

You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.

I couldn't bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.

The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.

Football really felt like a private thing when I was in my teens because it wasn't on television, for a start, apart from 'Match of the Day.'

I would like to have a go at TV. I think, especially when you have kids, that you spend a lot of time watching telly, and you think, 'How come I'm not doing that?'

Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do.

There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.

Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.

My computer is littered with abandoned projects.

I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.

There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.

We don't feel duty-bound to get all the way through a TV program. If we're not enjoying it, we turn over. Movies, we tend to give more of the benefit of the doubt because they're only 90 minutes or two hours. But books, there is this thing of, 'It's a book. I've got to finish it.'

Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever.

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.

I couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record.