Quotes from Nick Hornby

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good.

He was thinking about Edith. She was constantly on the verge of canceling their marriage. She would only commission a few shows at a time, reluctantly, and if he had listened properly, she'd always been telling him that it would all end one day.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

It was funny how you could still know little things about people, like where they kept their tin, even though you didn't know what they were thinking from one week to the next.

When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (£1.60 for egg mayonnaise and crispy bacon, and none of us have ever had more than four pieces of crispy bacon in a whole round yet) or anything at all. I will beam beatifically at all times, just from sheer relief.

a futballszurkoló természetes állapota a keser? csalódottság, függetlenül az eredménytÅ'l.

Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

There has been an unwise and spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to grow a goatee, hence a fluffy little tuft of something or other, just underneath the centre of his lower lip, that any mother would want to rub off with a bit of spit.

Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn't tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her.

Sometimes Marcus sounded as though he were a hundred years old, and it broke Will's heart.

Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.

Sometimes you can see car crashes from a long way off, if the road is straight and both vehicles are heading towards each other in the same lane.

She thought she'd focus on the compliment, rather than the terrifying glimpse she'd been given into her flatmate's soul. She found herself particularly worried by Marjorie's willingness to do all that, the slicing and the bleeding and the murdering, for only a percentage of the advantages she envied. There was something in this compromise that made it seem more real than Barbara wanted it to be.

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

Life was about to begin, so Arsenal had to go.

They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet.

I'm beginning to feel more embarrassed about the conversation than about anything we've just done. Horny? They really use that word? Jesus. All my life I've wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I have, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often. Apart from Americans, that is, who probably go to bed with Americans all the time.

I will always be grateful to her for creating in me the narcotic need to hear her song again and again. It is, after all, a harmless need, easily satisfied, and there are few enough of those in the world.

the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Talán mi túl magas lángon éljük az életünket, mi, akik egész nap érzelmes dolgokat szívunk magunkba, és emiatt aztán soha nem tudjuk egyszer?en csak elégedettnek érezni magunkat: az kell, hogy vagy boldogtalanok legyünk, vagy eksztatikusan, észveszejtÅ'en boldogok, márpedig ezeket az érzelmi állapotokat nehéz elérni egy stabil, nyugodt kapcsolaton belül.

She wanted to be given a funny script so that she could make it funnier.

When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.

Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

Lucy understood it now. The referendum was giving groups of people who didn't like each other, or at least failed to comprehend each other, an opportunity to fight.