Quotes from Nick Hornby

already a national institution: a cartoon cad

I could end up having sex here, and the prospect doesn't appall me. What better way to exorcize rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you? But you wouldn't just be sleeping with a person: you'd be sleeping with a whole sad single-person culture. If

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So

He knew he had only himself to blame; but it was more or less entirely her fault.

What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope: I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.

On the whole, though, the guests at the party preferred the narrative about lies, fear, stupidity and racism. They had lost an argument, and they never lost arguments. They were confused and angry.

My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole lot of averageness into one compact frame.

There was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and 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.

But something was going to give. He was having a shit time at school and a shit time at home, and as home and school was all there was to it, just about, that meant he was having a shit time all the time, apart from when he was asleep.

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. What

Taking your husband's name when you became his wife was one thing. Taking your town's name when you became its beauty queen was something else again.

When I say that you can hear God in 'One Man Guy' by Rufus Wainwright, I do not mean to suggest that there is an old chap with a beard – a divine Willie Nelson, if you will – warbling along with them.

I had discovered after the Swindon game that loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with. Marriages are nowhere near as rigid - you won't catch any Arsenal fans slipping off to Tottenham for a bit of extra-marital slap and tickle, and though divorce is a possibility (you can just stop going if things get too bad), getting hitched again is out of the question.

You need as much ballast as possible to stop you floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character them? I've got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I'm in danger of falling off the edge.

The only scenes I can stand in any of the Star Wars films are the quiet scenes in the second one, The Empire Strikes Back. Or rather, it used to be the second one, before the fourth one became the first one, thus making the second one the third one.

It is part of the essential Arsenal experience that they are loathed.

I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it.

Let her wonder. It's not often that I get the chance to be enigmatic and perplexing.

I'm stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, forever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, or the nearest Slaughterhouse. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

I stopped drinking so much, I stopped listening to song lyrics with quite the same morbid fascination (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 my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often.

By now I felt guilty about what I had got my father into. He had developed no real affection for the club, and would rather, I think, have taken me to any other First Division ground. I was acutely aware of this, and so a new source of discomfort emerged: as Arsenal huffed and puffed their way towards 1-0 wins and nil-nil draws I wriggled with embarrassment, waiting for Dad to articulate his dissatisfaction.

The immutable law of culture: if anything popular survives, it somehow becomes the property of the educated elite.

Próbáltam nem gondolni rá. Megtörtént, és kívántam, hogy bárcsak ne történt volna meg, de hát ilyen az élet, nem?