Quotes from Nick Hornby

There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.'

We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?

You can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were.

When most people come in from work, 95 percent of them reach for the remote control. Then they read before they go to sleep, to get off to sleep. They do that because reading feels like a duty, and TV feels like fun.

I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance.

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

When you're adapting a novel, there are always scenes taken out of the book, and no matter which scenes they are, it's always someone's favorite. As a screenwriter, you realize, 'Well, it doesn't work if you include everyone's favorite scenes.'

I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.

I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.

Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one.

The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.

The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.

[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

I think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless.

I have boys, and boys are particularly resistant to reading books. I had some success recently with Sherman Alexie's great young adult novel 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian.' I told my son it was highly inappropriate for him and one of the most banned books in America. That got his attention, and he raced through it.

I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right.

I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!

I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible.

I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home.

I kind of stumbled on the material for 'An Education' and thought it would make a good movie, and one of the things that came out of that, for me, was that I learned that if you write a big part for a girl or a young woman, you get the opportunity to work with the best talent in the world.