110+ Nick Hornby Quotes On Education, Friendship And Writing

Nick Hornby is an English writer, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down. He has also written several non-fiction works, including Fever Pitch, 31 Songs, and Songbook. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Nick Hornby on love, life, education.

Top 10 Nick Hornby Quotes

1. The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
2. It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
3. Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.
4. I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.
5. 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.
6. For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.
7. 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.
8. It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
9. Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.
10. Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

Nick Hornby Short Quotes

• He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.
• Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.
• ...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.
• The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone
• I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.
• I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
• The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.
• The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.
• The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.
• It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

Nick Hornby Quotes About Love

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

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. — Nick Hornby

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. — Nick Hornby

I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably. — Nick Hornby

I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me. — Nick Hornby

I've seen men like you in Doris Day films, but I never thought they existed in real life...The men who can't commit, who can't say 'I love you' even when they want to, who start to cough and sputter and change the subject. But here you are. A living, breathing specimen. Incredible. — Nick Hornby

So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up. — Nick Hornby

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. — Nick Hornby

It's love this and love that but of couse it's so easy to love someone you don't know, whether it's George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you've ever shared Christmas turkey- now there's a miracle. — Nick Hornby

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 don't like them as much as I do. — Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Quotes About Life

Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic. — Nick Hornby

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable. — Nick Hornby

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path. — Nick Hornby

I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgement. The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be. — Nick Hornby

The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives. — Nick Hornby

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch. — Nick Hornby

I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids. — Nick Hornby

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all — Nick Hornby

There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything. — 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

Nick Hornby Quotes About Writing

Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?' Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes. — Nick Hornby

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one. — Nick Hornby

It's no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won't find anything that you can build into a coherent whole. — Nick Hornby

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market. — Nick Hornby

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!) — Nick Hornby

I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too. — Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Quotes About Music

It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead. — Nick Hornby

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? — Nick Hornby

It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself — Nick Hornby

Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time. — Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Quotes About People

Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by. — Nick Hornby

...You can find people. It's like those acrobatic displays.... Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn't really matter who they are, as long as they're there and you don't let them go away without finding someone else. — Nick Hornby

Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't. — Nick Hornby

It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation. — Nick Hornby

Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice. — Nick Hornby

The trouble with history is that there are too many people involved — Nick Hornby

On New Year's Eve he ould make a resolution to recover some his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at people even if he disapproved of them — Nick Hornby

Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it's hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive. — Nick Hornby

We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons. — Nick Hornby

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! — Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Quotes About World

One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection. — Nick Hornby

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

I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's? — Nick Hornby

There's no doubt that he's the biggest sports star in the world now. (on David Beckham) — Nick Hornby

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself — Nick Hornby

Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't 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 isn't. — Nick Hornby

It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already. — Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby Famous Quotes And Sayings

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. — Nick Hornby

Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. ... The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy. — Nick Hornby

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. — Nick Hornby

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a fuck. I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers. How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies. — Nick Hornby

When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep. — Nick Hornby

A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You've got to kick off with a killer, to grab the attention. Then you've got to take it up a notch, or cool it off a notch…oh, there are a lot of rules. — Nick Hornby

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

You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one. — Nick Hornby

I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign. — Nick Hornby

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way. — Nick Hornby

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear. — Nick Hornby

Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini. — Nick Hornby

And it isn't that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live anymore. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home. I feel flat and there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to, so I'd rather call it a day. — Nick Hornby

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 they've all let him down. — Nick Hornby

Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play. — Nick Hornby

An official statement from Liverpool raised the spectre of a future where 'a club's rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation'. But on hearing this, many Manchester United fans would have been asking for a definition of the word 'rival'. — 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

What you don't catch a glimpse of on your wedding day- because how could you?- is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exhchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. — Nick Hornby

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. — Nick Hornby

I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will. — Nick Hornby

Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of a football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. — Nick Hornby

There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby. — Nick Hornby

We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement. — Nick Hornby

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

The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads. — Nick Hornby

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more. — Nick Hornby

For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true. — Nick Hornby

It takes a child to say the unsayable. — Nick Hornby

Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs. — Nick Hornby

This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place. — Nick Hornby

I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. Just once. I know I'm not born to run, I know that Seven Sisters' Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can't be different, can they? — Nick Hornby

When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on. — Nick Hornby

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. — Nick Hornby

We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute. — Nick Hornby

The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you. — Nick Hornby

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey. — Nick Hornby

I have a really low boredom threshold. — Nick Hornby

But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week. — Nick Hornby

But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery? — Nick Hornby

[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage. — Nick Hornby

You can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you. — Nick Hornby

Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. — Nick Hornby

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool. — Nick Hornby

You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change. — Nick Hornby

He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway? — Nick Hornby

my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost. — Nick Hornby

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand. — Nick Hornby

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too. — Nick Hornby

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way. — Nick Hornby

It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle. — Nick Hornby

Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable. — 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 can 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. — Nick Hornby

But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat. — Nick Hornby

[H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign? — Nick Hornby

I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. — Nick Hornby

No man is an island. — Nick Hornby

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty. — Nick Hornby

So now what? What happens when words fail us? — Nick Hornby

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time. — Nick Hornby

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. — Nick Hornby

I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic. — Nick Hornby

I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from. — Nick Hornby

Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded. — Nick Hornby

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

Life Lessons by Nick Hornby

1. Nick Hornby's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting yourself and others, as well as the power of friendship and connection.
2. Through his characters, Hornby shows us that life is messy and imperfect, but that it can still be filled with joy and meaning.
3. He also encourages us to be kind and compassionate, and to recognize the beauty in everyday moments.