Quotes from Nick Hornby

The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s.

It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that.

Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it.

Why are we scared of a '50s weepie? Why are we scared of a movie that pulls you in and punches you in the stomach?

If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.

I miss independent record stores very much.

The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore.

I think firmly that art is no use to anyone unless it offers some kind of consolation or hope.

I think, always, with a new book, I get nervous. I think mostly it is because work is really important to me, and a book doing well is important because it buys you another one. Not because of the money but if you keep doing interesting work, work that people like, they will want you to do more, and offers that are interesting come in.

Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay.

It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

I used to be a teacher, and I know how difficult it is to strike a balance between focused conversation and an atmosphere which prevents creativity and thought.

People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with.

However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.

You have to work at relationships. You can't just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.

I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life.

Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over.

I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.

With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made.

Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.