Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby
Nicholas Peter John "Nick" Hornbyis an English novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy. Hornby's work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide as of 2009...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 April 1957
song past thinking
The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.
inspirational motivational art
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.
art book home
(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the "Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
war fighting half
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.
character writing class
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!)
firsts different ifs
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.
heart talking years
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.
believe heaven want
I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.
missing legs might
I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.
beautiful falling-in-love intelligent
[...] 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.
narrative behind-you bunch
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.
children sleep things-in-life
(About Love)The most important thing in life, and you can't tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul-mate should look, I don't know, anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similar desperate people.
important
It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.
next-week unhappy london
I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?