Quotes by Nick Hornby

No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don’t choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.

Dave and Serge...played the Fiddlers Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serges extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldnt have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded...how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesnt and it doesnt matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people Id gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didnt want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I didnt want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature s dead as a dodo.(Nicks thoughts after seeing Marah at a little pub called Fiddlers Elbow.)

Id hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hours extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead theyd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? Theres an international symbol for the gents toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.

It would be nice to think that as Ive got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears have not burned with quite the same fury, and I have never had to count the packs of cheap cigarettes in order to avoid mocking eyes and floods of tears... not really, not actually, not as such. It just feels that way, sometimes.

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because theres something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... Its the best part of us probably ...

A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. Youve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with Got To Get You Off My Mind, but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then youve got to up it a notch, and you cant have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you cant have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless youve done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules.

A middle-aged woman who looked like someones cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didnt add up. Suicide wasnt invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – theres a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

Its music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows youre being a jerk, but when you get music rage, youre carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead

And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people dont like them as much as I do.

Years and years ago, I read a great interview with Jam and Lewis, the R&B producers, in which they described what it was like to be members of Princes band. Theyd sit down, and Prince would tell them what he wanted them to play, and theyd explain that they couldnt--they werent quick enough, or good enough. And Prince would push them and push them until they mastered it, and then just when they were feeling pleased with themselves for accomplishing something they didnt know they had the capacity for, hed tell them the dance steps he needed to accompany the music.This story has stuck with me, I think, because it seems like an encapsulation of the very best and most exciting kind of creative process.

he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...

We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. What does that mean, then? my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. Get it on / Bang a gong? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon? And the correct answer - Two seconds, and it doesnt matter - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside youre hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs.

The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing Yellow Submarine at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though theyll make me feel something, they wont make me feel anything bad.

Read any womens magazine and youll see the same complaint over and over again: men - those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on - are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in foreplay; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you cant help feeling, are ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls werent interested. They didnt want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried. Its not really very suprising, then, that were not much good at all that. We spent two or three long and extremely formative years being told very forcibly not even to think about it. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls dont, to something that women want and men cant be bothered with. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay - mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.) The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year-old boy.

when she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion... it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.

What was in it for me? I wasnt asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didnt she want her erogenous zones stimulated? I have no idea. All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Trojan.