Browsing Quotes By Nick Hornby, page 1
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Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” vs. 'Middlemarch?’ 'Middlemarch’ in six. “The Last Supper” vs. 'Crime and Punishment?’ Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception- “Blonde on Blonde” might mash up 'the Old Curiosity Shop,’ say, and I wouldn’t give much for 'Pale Fire’s’ chances against 'Citizen Kane.’ And every now and again you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so 'Back to the Future III’ might land a lucky punch on 'Rabbit, Run;’ but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: the Polysyllabic SpreePosted: 17 Oct 2010 at 7:39 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
She’s right of course. It’s not fair. 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.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: How to Be GoodPosted: 05 Nov 2009 at 6:43 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Who are these people, that they want to save the world and yet they are incapable of forming proper relationships with anybody? As GoodNews so eloquently puts it, it’s love this and love that, but of course 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.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: How to Be GoodPosted: 05 Nov 2009 at 6:39 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Getting married and having a family is like emigrating. I used to live in the same country as my brother; I used to share his values and his tastes and his attitudes, and then I moved away. And even though I didn’t notice it happening, I started to speak with a different accent, and think differently, and even though I remembered my native land fondly, all traces of it had gone from me.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: How to Be GoodPosted: 05 Nov 2009 at 6:35 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Sadness is a right sod for keeping itself hidden away. A right sod. Gotta come out sometime, though, and it’s pouring out of you.”
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: How to Be GoodPosted: 05 Nov 2009 at 6:29 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I’m forty one years old,” says David, “and I have spent half my life regretting that I missed the Sixties. I read about the energy, and I imagine what the music would’ve sounded like when you hadn’t heard it a thousand times before, and when it actually meant something, and I’ve always been sad that the world is different now.”
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: How to Be GoodPosted: 05 Nov 2009 at 6:27 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: How to Be GoodPosted: 05 Nov 2009 at 6:22 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Will decided he would correct any erroneous impressions he might have given slowly and patiently, but halfway through their first time out alone together, he was reminded of the old April Fool’s Day joke about Britain changing over to driving on the right, and making the changeover gradually. Either you lied or you told the truth, it appeared, and that in-between state was pretty tricky to achieve.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
One day, he thought, he might learn the lesson that lying about one’s very identity was a purely short-term strategy, useful only in relationships that had a limited life-span. You could tell a bus conductor or a taxi driver all sorts of rubbish, provided the journey was brief, but if you intended to spend the rest of your life with somebody, then it was kind of inevitable that she would find out things sooner or later.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Marcus was right, of course, but being right was no use if the rest of the world was wrong.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
He was almost sure that Rachel was about to make him very miserable indeed, mostly because he couldn’t see anything he might have that could possibly interest her.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends, it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out. These were people who could not control themselves, or protect themselves, people who, if only temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of The Rockford Files to make them complete.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What planet did this woman live on? She was so unworldly that she seemed to him to be an unlikely suicidal depressive, even though she sang with her eyes closed: surely anyone who floated that high above everything was protected in some way? But of course that was part of the problem. They were sitting here because a twelve-year-old’s craftiness had brought her crashing down to earth, and if Marcus could do it, any boyfriend or boss or landlord – any adult who didn’t love her – could do it. There was no protection in that. Why did these people want to make things so hard for themselves? It was easy life, easy peasy, a matter of simple arithmetic: loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favour, but they quite clearly weren’t. 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. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn’t worth the risk?
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
He knew, of course he knew, that the song couldn’t last forever, that the evening couldn’t last forever, that he would soon be home tucked up in bed, that singing round the piano with a depressive hippy and her weirdo son wouldn’t kill him. He knew all that, but he didn’t feel it. He couldn’t do anything with these people after all, he could see that now. He’d been stupid to think there was anything here for him.
When he got home he put a Pet Shop Boys CD on, and watched Prisoner: Cell Block H with the sound down. He wanted to hear people who didn’t mean it, and he wanted to watch people he could laugh at. He got drunk, too; he filled a glass with ice and poured himself scotch after scotch. And as the drink began to take hold, he realized that people who meant it were much more likely to kill themselves than people who didn’t: he couldn’t recall having even the faintest urge to take his own life, and he found it hard to imagine that he ever would. When it came down to it, he just wasn’t that engaged. You had to be engaged to be a vegetarian; you had to be engaged to sing “Both Sides Now” with your eyes closed; when it came down to it, you had to be engaged to be a mother. He wasn’t much bothered either way about anything, and that, he knew, would guarantee him a long and depression-free life. He’d made a big mistake thinking that good works were a way forward for him. They weren’t. they drove you mad. Fiona did good works and they had driven her mad: she was vulnerable, messed-up, and inadequate. Will had a system going here that was going to whizz him effortlessly to the grave. He didn’t want to fuck it up now.Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What was there to laugh at? Not much, really, unless you were the kind of person who was on a permanent lookout for something to laugh at. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of person most kids were, in his experience. They patrolled up and down school corridors like sharks, except that what they were on the lookout for wasn’t flesh but the wrong trousers, or the wrong haircut, or the wrong sneakers, any or all of which sent them wild with excitement.
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:17 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“See, I’ve always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things. I know you don’t know how you feel about me, but I do know how I feel about you. I know I want to stay with you and I keep pretending otherwise, to myself and you, and we just limp on and on. It’s like we sign a new contract every few weeks or so, and I don’t want that anymore. And I know that if we got married I’d take it seriously, and I wouldn’t want to mess about.”
“And you can make a decision about it just like that, can you? In cold blood, bang bang, if I do that, then this will happen? I’m not sure that it works like that.”
“But it does, you see. Just because it’s a relationship, and it’s based on soppy stuff, it doesn’t mean you can’t make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. That’s where I’ve been going wrong. I’ve been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.”Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:23 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I know what’s wrong with Laura. What’s wrong with Laura is that I’ll never see her for the first or second or third time again. I’ll never spend two or three days in a sweat trying to remember what she looks like, never again will I get to a pub a half an hour early to meet her, staring at the same article in a magazine and looking at my watch every thirty seconds, never again will thinking about her set something off in me like “Let’s Get It On” sets something off in me.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:22 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Women get it wrong when they complain about the media images of women. Men understand that not everyone had Bardot’s breasts, or Jamie Lee Curtis’ neck, or Cindy Crawford’s bottom, and we don’t mind at all. Obviously we’d take Kim Basinger over Phyllis Diller, just as women would take Keanu Reeves over Sergeant Bilko, but it’s not the body that’s important, it’s the level of abasement. We worked out very quickly that Bond girls were out of our league, but the realization that women won’t ever look at us the way Ursula Andress looked at Sean Connery, or even in the way that Doris day looked at Rock Hudson, was much slower to arrive, for most of us. In my case, I’m not at all sure that it ever did.
…It’s much harder to get used to the idea that my little-boy notion of romance, of negligees and candlelit dinners at home and long, smoldering glances, had no basis in reality at all. That’s what women ought to get all steamed up about; that’s why we can’t function properly in a relationship. It’s not the cellulite or the crow’s feet. It’s the…the… the disrespect.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“That’s the point of us. You have potential. I’m here to bring it out.”
“Potential as what?”
“As a human being. You have all the basic ingredients. You’re really very likable, when you put your mind to it. You make people laugh, when you can be bothered, and you’re kind, and when you decide you like someone then that person feels as though she’s the center of the whole world, and that’s a very sexy feeling. It’s just that most of the time you can’t be bothered.”
“No,” is all I can think of to say.
“You just… you just don’t do anything. You get lost in your head, and you sit around thinking instead of getting on with something, and most of the time you think rubbish. You always seem to miss what’s really happening.”Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:20 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and force us to get on with it. And its much worse in real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.”
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!