Skip to content

Portrait of Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby

(1957) Novelist United Kingdom

645 quotes in 1690 categories

Nick Hornby says waiting for a muse isn’t as useful as just doing the work, and he describes a bad week that lives only in his head. He jokes about making a compilation tape like a breakup and compares himself to a drinkable white wine. His voice is honest and funny.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

Nick Hornby is a novelist from the United Kingdom, best known for High Fidelity.

Quick Facts About Nick Hornby

Born: April 17, 1957
Nationality: United Kingdom
Profession: Novelist
Notable works: High Fidelity
Known for: Fever Pitch

About Nick Hornby

Hornby’s stories often mix music, sport, and the restless, obsessive thoughts of his characters. His books have sold more than five million copies worldwide as of 2018. In a 2004 BBC poll, he was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. He has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, for An Education in 2009 and for Brooklyn in 2015.

Awards & Honors

British Sports Book Awards E. M. Forster Award Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Award for Sports Journalism Q24930544 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Quotes by Nick Hornby

I applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once.

Image

No man is an island...

Island

Image

I have a really low boredom threshold.

Bored

Image

My relationships are fairly stable.

Image

What good were real feelings anyway?

Feelings

Image

Reading begets reading.

Image

“Passion was a part of being human.”

Human

Image

I think I am naturally depressive.

Image

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

Human

Image

“His father fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.”

Father

Image

Human beings are millions of things in one day.

Human

Image

Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.

Alive

Image

“I'm OK. Really. I can find people. I'll be all right.”

Image

He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.

Image

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

Image

“Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented.”

Image

“And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless…

Depression

Image

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…

Image

“He had to say that the thing he found most attractive about her was that she had tried to kill herself. Now…

Sexy

Image

“I have tried to live with women who share a similar sensibility to mine, with predictably disastrous consequences, but the opposite route…

Image

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

Image

“I have no idea what the record for being effectively dead is, but Fabrice Muamba didn’t seem to have broken it.”

Image

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

Book

Image

I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a…

Image

When it came down to it, he just wasn't that engaged. You had to be engaged to be a vegetarian; you had…

Image

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,…

Image

On New Year's Eve he ould make a resolution to recover some his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as…

Happy new year

Image

“(in those days, before Gazza, before cynical and meaningless pre-season tournaments which somehow still offer a methadone alternative to the real competitions…

Football

Image

“A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are…

Dating

Image

Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having - a little fantasy about the people we might turn…

Aspiration

Image

I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives…

Accusation

Image

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought…

Disruption

Image

“What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I…

Broken hearts

Image

“She had come out tonight because she believed there had to be a present tense, somewhere, and she'd followed Gav and Barnesy…

Present tense

Image

“partially satisfied by grazing on the first few pages of several books, and as a consequence, there are half-chewed novels lying all…

Book

Image

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that,…

Book

Image

We had no irony when it came to girls, though. There was just no time to develop it. One moment they weren't…

Image

“The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not…

Image

“I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs…

Books

Image

“I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does…

Image

Nick Hornby by topic

Books (90) Time (79) Life (71) Writer (60) People (48) Music (42) Book (39) Writing (38) Football (37) Reading (31) Song (28) Love (24) Humor (18) World (17) Thinking (17) Art (14)