Nick Hornby

I can remember my father gave me a huge history of football for my 12th birthday - I used to read that a lot. I can remember thinking it was cool that something I was interested in even had a history. Most things I loved didn't.

— Nick Hornby

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

— Nick Hornby

Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax.

— Nick Hornby

Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.

— Nick Hornby

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.

— Nick Hornby

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.

— Nick Hornby

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive.

— Nick Hornby

Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.

— Nick Hornby

I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains.

— Nick Hornby

Then I lost it. Kinda lost it all, you know. Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds.

— Nick Hornby

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.

— Nick Hornby

Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them all over London — they were the best invention Will had ever heard of.

— Nick Hornby

Each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before.

— Nick Hornby

These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and ... and it was too late.

— Nick Hornby

And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile alot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody.

— Nick Hornby

What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?

— Nick Hornby

I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing... Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become."

— Nick Hornby

But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.

— Nick Hornby

And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.

— Nick Hornby

I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it sometime. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes.

— Nick Hornby

I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers' Hose, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof, but I didn't blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me?

— Nick Hornby

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.

— Nick Hornby

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.

— Nick Hornby