Quotes from Nick Hornby

in those days, before Gazza, before cynical and meaningless pre-season tournaments which somehow still offer a methadone alternative to the real competitions to come, before the ludicrous freneticism of the contemporary transfer market, the newspapers went weeks on end without even mentioning football)

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900; I'd like people to look at it and think, 'How the hell did he end up right over there?

He still wanted his community to be the place where he lived, a community which contained old white women, young Muslim men, Lithuanian kids, mixed-race girls, Asian parents

He thinks that if we leave the E.U. he's going to be earning a lot more.

Gravity. Stronger at some times than others.

So, have you split up now?

to father) Aren't you glad that you've never had to buy vegeterian cookery books as the first small step on the road to getting inside someone's knickers? (father) ...however vegeterian recepies you have read, you still have more fun than we were ever allowed.

This book is about work, and nobody ever worked harder than these two, or at a higher standard, while connectiong with so many people for so long.

This is a song by Emmylou Harris called 'Boulder to Birmingham,'" she announces. "It's on the album Pieces of the Sky, which Rob is selling this afternoon for the unbelievable price of five pounds and ninety-nine pence, and you can find it right over there in the 'Country Artists (Female)' section.

Quite a way back down the line my self-pity had got the better of me. I really did blame it all -- the terrible food, the nightmarish walks, the cramped, uncomfortable tents, the revolting, fly-plagued holes we were supposed to crap into, and, worst of all, the two empty seats in the West Stand -- on the fact that I was the child of estranged parents, the product of a broken home;

Non potevano dare alla gente quel che voleva, se non c'era gente lì a ricevere il dono

Sophie was beginning to realize that there was nothing to be done about actors: they would always end up sleeping with each other. They had always done so, and they probably always would.

if I do OK with women, it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don't have.

Being at the top of your career was like being at the top of a Ferris wheel: you knew that you had to keep moving, and you knew which way you were going. You had no choice.

You want to talk about big things, but it's the catches on the garden sheds and the London Zoo cards that give you the footholds; without them you wouldn't know where to start.

Even the Brazilian way of celebrating a goal - run four strides, jump, punch, run four strides, jump, punch - was alien and funny and enviable, all at the same time.

Más aún que eso, estaba como de costumbre a la espera de que el Arsenal me enseñase que las cosas no siempre van a peor, que las malas rachas terminan tarde o temprano, que se puede cambiar de hábitos, que no es posible perder muchos partidos seguidos.

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

Den musik man redan har räcker inte en hel livstid, inte om man lyssnar på musik varje dag och så fort man kommer åt.

She didn't want her father to die. She would mourn him. She owed him . . . not everything, exactly, because there were lots of things she'd had to obtain for herself, but enough. If, however, the choice was between a brief good-bye and a new life, then it was no choice at all.

Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would try to touch her between her legs, a gesture that had a sort of self-parodying wit about it: it was like trying to borrow a fiver, getting turned down, and asking to borrow fifty quid instead. These

We're sitting in my back garden on a hot summer night, eating barbecued chicken and listening to Todd Rundgren, when a friend suddenly explodes into a rant about pop music.

She had been dumped a couple of years before by a sort of male equivalent to Charlie, a guy called Michael who wanted to be something at the BBC. (He never made it, the wanker, and each day we never saw him on TV or heard him on the radio, something inside us rejoiced.)

I can't help but love David at this moment. He's calm when he has every right to be angry with everything and everyone, and as a result I feel, for the first time in a long time, that we are a unit