Quotes from Nick Hornby

The contrast between the strong, clean, straight lines of a cup run and the messy, tangled, overgrown paths of a life is plangent: I wish I could draw one of those big knock-out trophy diagrams to show how I'd ended up playing on the unfamiliar turf of a Hampstead psychiatrist's carpet.

This thing about looking for someone less different… It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

Pero lo que resultaba raro a su edad era que uno se pasaba la mitad del tiempo soñando con lo que podía suceder y la otra mitad intentando no pensar en eso, y en ambos casos uno se encontraba aprisionado en un periodo vital que no parecía importar demasiado, a mitad de camino entre la infancia y lo que implicara la madurez consolidada. (...)Y tal vez eso no tuviera ningún futuro, pero era un presente, y en eso consiste la vida.

It had never occurred to Sophie that she would be forgiven so readily for her trespasses and she wasn't sure that she liked it. She had refused to visit her dangerously ill father in hospital because her career was more important to her, and the least he could do was judge her. You could get away with anything, it seemed, if you were on the telly.

He accused her of being bourgeois, whatever that was—it seemed to involve engagement rings and babies and all sorts of things she wasn't interested in. He got so heated about them that for a moment she thought he might actually be proposing, in an angry, cack-handed fashion.

He was beginning to wonder whether June's facility, and their shared interest, might serve them better in the long run than a passionate sexual relationship that would eventually die on them.

She was so clever, Dennis thought, and so kind, and he found the familiar gloom descend upon him.

Problema della mia generazione è che ci sentiamo tutti dei geni del cazzo. Far qualcosa per noi non è abbastanza, e neanche vendere qualcosa, o insegnare qualcosa o solamente combinare qualcosa: no, noi dobbiamo essere qualcosa.

Maybe there is a point to this banality after all. If I travel to see my mother on the train now the fare is £2.70 for a day return, a tenfold increase on 1970 adult prices; but in the 91/92 season it now cost £8 to stand on the terraces at Arsenal, a thirty-two-fold increase.

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

I'm going to take every chance I get to make a nuisance of myself when somebody I admire is in the vicinity...

But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot—how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway.

not even sex, especially not sex, please God not sex, the filthiest and most terrifying invention of the early seventies.

It's a funny thing, sex, she said. It's a little thing like a glass of water is a little thing. Or something that falls off a car and only costs a couple of bob to replace. It's only a little thing, but nothing works without it.

Top five things I miss about Laura...Two: she's got character...she's loyal and honest, and she doesn't even take it out on people when she's having a bad day. That's character.

OK, you don't know me, so you'll have to take my word for it that I'm not stupid. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. I like Faulkner and Dickens and Vonnegut and Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas.

Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.

But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. [...] This is me. I wanted to say when I read Tyler's rich, sad, lovely novel. I'm not a character, I'm nothing like the author, I haven't had the experiences she writes about. But even so, this is what I feel like, inside. This is what I would sound like, if I ever found my voice.

várias músicas lembram-me do colégio ou de ex-namoradas ou de um emprego de verão, mas não tenho apreço por nenhuma delas - nenhuma significa nada para mim como música, só como lembrança (...)

Here's how not to plan a career: (a) split up with girlfriend; (b) junk college; (c) go to work in record shop; (d) stay in record shops for rest of life.

Songs undressed like that, without a stitch of Stratocaster on them, are scary – you have to work them out for yourself.

If she came into my shop, I might really get to like her, and then I'd be waiting for her to come in all the time, and then when she did come in I'd be nervous and stupid, and probably end up asking her out for a drink in some cackhanded roundabout way, and either she wouldn't catch my drift, and I'd feel like an idiot, or she'd turn me down flat, and I'd feel like an idiot.

lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen.

It was an inappropriate thought, but the baby wasn't so much like a love child, the effortless product of the blissful or even oblivious union of two people. He was a different sort of miracle, the effortful product of a tricky collaboration between unlikely partners. He was their version of a television program.