Quotes from Nick Hornby

And also, what kind of job was comic magician? She didn't think she could bear to be married to a comic magician, even if his breath were sweeter than Parma violets and his kisses were like atom bombs. Comic magicians belonged on seaside piers. Comic magicians were what she had come to London to escape, not to find, and certainly not to marry.

But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.

When they – I cannot bring myself to use the first-person plural in this instance.

Is there a reason for the sudden fashion for the eight-goal tie? Maybe it's because defending is hard, and boring, and thankless, and most people who are paid a six-figure sum weekly do very little that is hard or boring or thankless.

There aren't any buts," said Bill. "That's the whole point of being a writer, isn't it? If I wanted buts, I'd go and work in a fucking but factory.

That's why; he's worried about how his life is turning out, and he's lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.

She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.

I'll have got him out of my system." "I hope not." "Really?" "What would there be left of you, if you did?

Chelsea fans may have been listening to the Beatles and the Stones, but at Highbury half-time entertainment was provided by the Metropolitan Police Band and their vocalist, Constable Alex Morgan. Morgan (whose rank never changed ...) ... sang highlights from light operettas.

Can I be a good person and spend that much money on overpriced consumer goods? I don't know. But I do know this: I'd be no good without them.

Don't you ever have conversations where someone took a wrong turn at some point, and then it goes on and on and it becomes too late to put things right?

I don't think I was very happy, and the problem with being a thirteen-year-old depressive is that when the rest of life is so uproarious, which it invariably is, there is no suitable context for the gloom.

like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.

It was almost as if he had been given a glimpse of what it was like to be human. It wasn't too bad, really; he wouldn't even mind being human on full-time basis

All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning.

My friend Simon managed only sixteen of the seventeen League games - he smashed his head on a bookshelf in London a few hours before the Grimsby game on the 28th of Decemebr; his girlfriend had to take his car keys away from him because he kept making dazed attempts to drive from Fulham up to the Abbey.

for a while, I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which, as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked more or less the whole time)

All sorts of pieces of music are constantly being described as 'sexy', but that doesn't necessarily mean that you'd want them to accompany lovemaking. Most of them, in fact, are sexual substitutes, rather than sexual accompaniments – music for people who aren't getting any (or won't be until they get home) rather than people who are.

Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy--but he doesn't see why weltschmerz shouldn't come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass--the edge of the left cheek, say.

Being a freak isn't the same thing as having a talent.

There aren't too many candlelit dinners and second honeymoons, I can tell you. We're beyond all that. We're good friends more than anything.

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not.

The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you. He

When you think about it it's like brexit. There are going to be two years of talks before we even agree on what the issues are.