Nick Hornby Quotes

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read 'Ulysses' and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English?

- Nick Hornby

There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.

- Nick Hornby

When you're adapting a novel, there are always scenes taken out of the book, and no matter which scenes they are, it's always someone's favorite. As a screenwriter, you realize, 'Well, it doesn't work if you include everyone's favorite scenes.'

- Nick Hornby

I have boys, and boys are particularly resistant to reading books. I had some success recently with Sherman Alexie's great young adult novel 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian.' I told my son it was highly inappropriate for him and one of the most banned books in America. That got his attention, and he raced through it.

- Nick Hornby

I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.

- Nick Hornby

The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen.

- Nick Hornby

Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives.

- Nick Hornby

I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home.

- Nick Hornby

Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories.

- Nick Hornby

The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.

- Nick Hornby

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 'Just Kids' are both incredible.

- Nick Hornby

We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.

- Nick Hornby

I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did.

- Nick Hornby

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.

- 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

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

- Nick Hornby

Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay.

- Nick Hornby

Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever.

- Nick Hornby

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.

- Nick Hornby

I miss independent record stores very much.

- Nick Hornby

The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore.

- Nick Hornby

It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting.

- Nick Hornby

Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do.

- Nick Hornby

I would like to have a go at TV. I think, especially when you have kids, that you spend a lot of time watching telly, and you think, 'How come I'm not doing that?'

- Nick Hornby

I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.

- Nick Hornby

The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.

- Nick Hornby

It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were.

- Nick Hornby

At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times.

- Nick Hornby

It seems to me quite often that the journeys of young women are more moving because they are hemmed in more, and dramatically it's more interesting to think about and write about people whose lives are circumscribed in some way.

- Nick Hornby

I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh.

- Nick Hornby

Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.

- Nick Hornby

There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.'

- Nick Hornby

I didn't really want to write about music very much in 'High Fidelity.' I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with.

- Nick Hornby

Home was extremely normal. But my dad's life was quite exotic, really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home.

- Nick Hornby

Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.

- Nick Hornby

I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.

- Nick Hornby

Why are we scared of a '50s weepie? Why are we scared of a movie that pulls you in and punches you in the stomach?

- Nick Hornby

Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one.

- Nick Hornby

People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with.

- Nick Hornby

One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time.

- Nick Hornby

A lot of what 'Funny Girl' is about, for me, is the experience feeling very happy doing a certain thing with a certain group of people. That partly came about because of having really positive experiences writing movies.

- Nick Hornby

I'd say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college.

- Nick Hornby

However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.

- Nick Hornby

I used to be a teacher, and I know how difficult it is to strike a balance between focused conversation and an atmosphere which prevents creativity and thought.

- Nick Hornby

I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language.

- Nick Hornby

I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.

- Nick Hornby

I kind of stumbled on the material for 'An Education' and thought it would make a good movie, and one of the things that came out of that, for me, was that I learned that if you write a big part for a girl or a young woman, you get the opportunity to work with the best talent in the world.

- Nick Hornby

Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.

- Nick Hornby

With 'Brooklyn,' I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I just had a very strong sense that if I turned the volume up a little bit, it could be something really special.

- Nick Hornby

Football really felt like a private thing when I was in my teens because it wasn't on television, for a start, apart from 'Match of the Day.'

- Nick Hornby

In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.

- Nick Hornby

If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s.

- Nick Hornby

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

- Nick Hornby

The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.

- Nick Hornby

I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.

- Nick Hornby

I'm quite gloomy. I just am one of those people, vaguely lugubrious.

- Nick Hornby

My relationships are fairly stable.

- Nick Hornby

Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine.

- Nick Hornby

Jeremy Corbyn has proved popular with young voters in part because he has promised an end to austerity.

- Nick Hornby

It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that.

- Nick Hornby

I always thought 'Of Mice and Men' was such a perfect book because there's nothing not to understand, but it's still really clever and moving and complicated, but everybody understands the complication.

- Nick Hornby

I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right.

- Nick Hornby

Screenwriting is about condensing.

- Nick Hornby

You can't really ask for anything more than to be working for your entire life - and to be doing something that some people respond to.

- Nick Hornby

The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are.

- 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

I think I am naturally depressive.

- Nick Hornby

Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it.

- Nick Hornby

I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.

- Nick Hornby

If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.

- Nick Hornby

I think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way.

- Nick Hornby

Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment.

- Nick Hornby

I've never met anyone who is seriously bad.

- Nick Hornby

If you can get every kid to have found a book that he or she loves, then you've done a great job.

- Nick Hornby

Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person.

- Nick Hornby

All the Oscars stuff for 'An Education' was incredibly exciting, especially because it was such an underdog project - no one would give us the money for it, and we all nearly gave up because it wasn't getting anywhere, then suddenly a breakthrough and this really lovely film, which then took on a life of its own.

- Nick Hornby

The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir.

- Nick Hornby

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, we tend to give more of the benefit of the doubt because they're only 90 minutes or two hours. But books, there is this thing of, 'It's a book. I've got to finish it.'

- Nick Hornby

My computer is littered with abandoned projects.

- Nick Hornby

Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty.

- Nick Hornby

I couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record.

- Nick Hornby

I used to go and see the Clash a fair bit. I did think they were dead cool, and very handsome.

- 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

I think firmly that art is no use to anyone unless it offers some kind of consolation or hope.

- Nick Hornby

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

- Nick Hornby

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

- Nick Hornby

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

- Nick Hornby

Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over.

- Nick Hornby

When most people come in from work, 95 percent of them reach for the remote control. Then they read before they go to sleep, to get off to sleep. They do that because reading feels like a duty, and TV feels like fun.

- Nick Hornby

I think the moment you're writing about somebody who's not exactly you, then the challenge is all equal.

- Nick Hornby

The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

- Nick Hornby

I think, always, with a new book, I get nervous. I think mostly it is because work is really important to me, and a book doing well is important because it buys you another one. Not because of the money but if you keep doing interesting work, work that people like, they will want you to do more, and offers that are interesting come in.

- Nick Hornby

It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music.

- Nick Hornby

The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you're not listening, you're not going to have any fun reading.

- Nick Hornby

I think I became less literary after I sold more!

- Nick Hornby

If it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book.

- Nick Hornby

With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made.

- Nick Hornby

I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success.

- Nick Hornby

I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life.

- Nick Hornby

When someone says they've read your book 15 times, you think, 'Well, you should read something else.'

- Nick Hornby

I think it's weird when you become rich at 40.

- Nick Hornby

I think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless.

- Nick Hornby

I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance.

- 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