Quotes from Nick Hornby

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature--match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here...he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes. (Hornby's thoughts after reading Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly)

They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.

writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers.

The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad.

Just because it's a relationship, and it's based on soppy stuff, it doesn't mean you can't make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you'll never get anywhere. That's where I've been going wrong. I've been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.

He was distraught, of course: he was just the kind of idiot who could only understand what things meant by doing them first.

Does that help? Probably not, unless you are sane enough to believe that the truth about anyone is disappointing, the truth about me especially so.

But Tony was a storyteller, and he knew that if you looked at any narrative closely enough you could trace the unraveling back and back and back—right to the very beginning, if the story was good enough.

Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only cool people screwed up.

In Lucy's experience, these were the two genders, boys and readers. She wished there was as much gender fluidity as people seemed to think.

He really liked this woman. Or, rather, he was really attracted to her, and nothing she had said so far had weakened the attraction.

A veces hemos de ser juzgados por nuestros actos únicos.

They were expressions of who he was and what he'd become, and he couldn't do anything about any of it, apart from retrace his steps back and back and back, until he was fifteen or ten or three years old, and start again.

An official statement from Liverpool raised the spectre of a future where 'a club's rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation'. But on hearing this, many Manchester United fans would have been asking for a definition of the word 'rival'.

Manchester City striker Mario Balotelli sets his own house on fire, apparently after letting off fireworks in his bathroom. Two days later City beat United 6–1, and after scoring the first goal Balotelli revealed a T-shirt bearing the question 'Why always me?' This was presumably intended to be rhetorical, but Cheshire Fire and Rescue service, who were at Balotelli's house until 2.45 a.m., could presumably have provided an answer.

Thirty years on, things have changes to the extent that Wayne Rooney could comfortably afford to employ the best-paid banker in Britain full-time, if he could see any purpose or momentary amusement in doing so.

For us it is not comparable, the FA Cup and Champions League,' Arsène Wenger said before Arsenal played Leeds in the FA Cup. 'The Champions League is compulsory. The FA Cup is something that is for enjoyment … The basis of our life at the top level is dictated by the championship. If we can add on top of that the FA Cup it is fantastic.

Maybe nobody went to see the Rolling Stones here in 1964,' said Ros. 'The dead shark was just too much fun.

During the game, we find endless ways of saying that our team needs to score goals while at the same time not letting any in: 'We need a goal here,' 'We don't want to let one in now,' and so on. ('Here' and 'now' are the words intended to indicate a keen understanding of the complex nature of the particular game, but in truth they mean nothing. Teams always need to score, and never want to let one in.)

During the season, fans tend to observe, in as many complicated ways and with as much detail as we can come up with, only that a winning team is very good, and a losing team is hopeless. My mother or Prince Charles or probably a Martian could make the same observation, but their views would be discounted on the grounds of ignorance.

Deaner ran down to the barrier separating the crowd from the pitch, and eventually persuaded the stewards that he had a part to play in the unfolding drama. (Anyone who has ever attempted to talk to a steward at a Premiership football ground will recognize that, whatever else during the afternoon required divine intervention, Deaner's success in getting on to the White Hart Lane turf really was a miracle.)

We are, a lot of the time, baffled by the news we see on the front pages of our newspapers, often because the stories are complex, and we missed the beginning of them anyway. (How far back do we have to go to find the roots of the Euro crisis? To 2008? 1999, when the currency came into being? 1992? 1945?) That is one of the reasons why natural disasters and murders and cases involving missing children become so involving: we understand them.

Even Tucker's way of not living could be described as living, if you had a crush on him.)

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.