Quotes from Nick Hornby

It seems to me quite often that the journeys of young women are more moving because they are hemmed in more, and dramatically it's more interesting to think about and write about people whose lives are circumscribed in some way.

Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad".

I think I became less literary after I sold more!

I applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once.

I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language.

Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.

I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.

It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting.

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read 'Ulysses' and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English?

The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.

Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine.

All the Oscars stuff for 'An Education' was incredibly exciting, especially because it was such an underdog project - no one would give us the money for it, and we all nearly gave up because it wasn't getting anywhere, then suddenly a breakthrough and this really lovely film, which then took on a life of its own.

I always thought 'Of Mice and Men' was such a perfect book because there's nothing not to understand, but it's still really clever and moving and complicated, but everybody understands the complication.

My relationships are fairly stable.

...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.

Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories.

Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty.

We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.

I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.

It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.