Top 60 Nick Hornby Quotes

Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we’re struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.

I couldn’t imagine a list of 10 records that didn’t contain a punk record – that didn’t contain a Clash record.

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

I think it’s weird when you become rich at 40.

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

My computer is littered with abandoned projects.

We don’t feel duty-bound to get all the way through a TV program. If we’re not enjoying it, we turn over. Movies, we tend to give more of the benefit of the doubt because they’re only 90 minutes or two hours. But books, there is this thing of, ‘It’s a book. I’ve got to finish 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?

Jeremy Corbyn has proved popular with young voters in part because he has promised an end to austerity.

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.

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 think I became less literary after I sold more!

Home was extremely normal. But my dad’s life was quite exotic, really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home.

I used to go and see the Clash a fair bit. I did think they were dead cool, and very handsome.

I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.

The easiest thing to write was ‘Fever Pitch’ because it was a memoir.

Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.

The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you’re not listening, you’re not going to have any fun reading.

With ‘Brooklyn,’ I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I just had a very strong sense that if I turned the volume up a little bit, it could be something really special.

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

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

In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I’m playacting at being somebody who’s grown up.

There’s music every day. I don’t think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I’m writing. It’s more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.

When someone says they’ve read your book 15 times, you think, ‘Well, you should read something else.’

We can’t be as good as we’d want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?

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.

I’m a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I’m scared they wouldn’t want to hang out with me if I stopped.

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

I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did.

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

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

I’m really not a big rereader – I’m too aware of my own ignorance.

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.

Everything’s complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

I didn’t really want to write about music very much in ‘High Fidelity.’ I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with.

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.

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 miss independent record stores very much.

I’d say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college.

Screenwriting is about condensing.

The most important thing for me is realism. I don’t like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I’m no great fan of the hard work literary novel.

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

I think the moment you’re writing about somebody who’s not exactly you, then the challenge is all equal.

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.

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.’

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

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

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.

Football really felt like a private thing when I was in my teens because it wasn’t on television, for a start, apart from ‘Match of the Day.’

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.

I think I am naturally depressive.

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.

You can’t really ask for anything more than to be working for your entire life – and to be doing something that some people respond to.

It wasn’t until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music.

I would like to have a go at TV. I think, especially when you have kids, that you spend a lot of time watching telly, and you think, ‘How come I’m not doing that?’