Quotes from Nick Hornby

I have tried to live with women who share a similar sensibility to mine, with predictably disastrous consequences, but the opposite route seems every bit as hopeless.

La música sentimental tiene la especial cualidad de llevarte hacia atrás en el tiempo a la vez que te lleva hacia delante, y por eso te sientes nostálgico y esperanzado a la vez.

At around four o'clock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it's going OK, maybe because I'm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.

She stopped typing. If she'd been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn't a satisfying equivalent with e-mail, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it.

Vorweg ein paar grundsätzliche Regeln: 1) Ich möchte keine Klagen hören, ich würde zu viel Geld für Bücher ausgeben, die ich dann doch nicht lese. Das weiß ich selbst. Ich habe stets die Absicht, sie mehr oder weniger alle zu lesen. Meine Absichten sind gut. Und schließlich ist es ja mein Geld. Ich wette, bei Ihnen ist es ähnlich.

Seeing as he wasn't very bright, I was pretty sure that he was going to be good at fighting.

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 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?

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.

It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old; surely six years wasn't long enough for a transformation of that magnitude.

It was then, for the first time, that Will saw the kind of help Marcus needed. Fiona had given him the idea that Marcus was after a father figure, someone to guide him gently towards male adulthood, but that wasn't it at all: Marcus needed help to be a kid, not an adult.

my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman – that is to say, I hated England just as much as half of my compatriots seemed to do.

She of all people knows what compilation tapes represent.

A beautiful woman combining the prospect of happiness and nakedness in the same spoken sentence could achieve the power of the greatest lyric poetry.

What does it feel like, having a missing sister? I can tell you. You know how if you lose something valuable, a wallet or a piece of jewelry, you can't concentrate on anything else? Well, it feels like that all the time, every day

What came first _ the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?

I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who get by aren't so far away from being suicidal. Maybe I shouldn't find that as comforting as I do.

Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older;

How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world's problems?

Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don't you? It's only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing.

Well. I don't see passion as . . . as petrol. Something that runs out. I see it as more like, I don't know, something you lose. Like keys." He picks up the pen he's using to do the crossword and waves it around. "Or this biro." "Keys get found. Biros don't. So it's important for me to know which it is." Tom doesn't say anything. "Keys? Or a biro?" Tom doesn't say anything. Louise is getting angry.

So, yes, of course I feel nostalgic, even if I am longing for a time which never really belonged to us: like I said, 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.

sometimes it's moments like that, real, complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realise that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.