Quotes by Nick Hornby

“I have a really low boredom threshold.”

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

“Theres a hundred million different ways of writing, and it takes you a long time to sort through that stuff. And I think it takes anyone a long time to find a voice.”

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you dont need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

Sometimes you know youve got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasnt so messed up, it wouldnt be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isnt.

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.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

my friends dont seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I havent lost.

When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I dont know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that theyve been listening to the sad songs longer than theyve been living the unhappy lives.

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly theyve all let him down.

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if youre doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, theyre the first to go. And theres some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just dont get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, Im sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? Im sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, theres nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because its such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (Its also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers wont mind!

I dont mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that dont fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you cant often apply science to literature.

Funny + sad is what Im pitching for, every time.

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

Its no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldnt even speak to each other if they met at a party.

I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what youve got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.