Top 140 Nick Hornby Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.”

— Nick Hornby

2. “Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Suffering Quotes

3. “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

Featured in: Music Quotes

4. “Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.”

— Nick Hornby

5. “What went wrong? Nothing and everything.”

— Nick Hornby

6. “No man is an island...”

— Nick Hornby

7. “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

8. “I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.”

— Nick Hornby

9. “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

10. “It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Depressing Quotes, Depression Quotes

11. “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

12. “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.”

— Nick Hornby

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

— Nick Hornby

14. “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.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Football Quotes

15. “So now what? What happens when words fail us?”

— Nick Hornby

16. “You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you.”

— Nick Hornby

17. “You’ll remember someone who broke your heart, and you’ll think to yourself, ‘Oh yes, I remember how that feels.’ But you can’t.”

— Nick Hornby

18. “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

19. “Record stores can’t save your life. But they can give you a better one.”

— Nick Hornby

20. “You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.”

— Nick Hornby

21. “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.”

— Nick Hornby

22. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

23. “The truth will set you free. Either that or it’ll get you a punch in the nose.”

— Nick Hornby

24. “For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”

— Nick Hornby

25. “He’s at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.”

— Nick Hornby

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

— Nick Hornby

27. “Life isn’t, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.”

— Nick Hornby

28. “It’s not what you like but what you are like that’s important.”

— Nick Hornby

29. “You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...”

— Nick Hornby

30. “Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Book Quotes, Momentum Quotes

31. “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

32. “Everything’s complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.”

— Nick Hornby

33. “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.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Book Quotes

34. “I’m not telling you that suicidal people aren’t so far away from people who can get by; I’m telling you that people who can get by aren’t so far away from being suicidal.”

— Nick Hornby

35. “Reading begets reading.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Reading Quotes

36. “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

Featured in: New Year Quotes

37. “Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.”

— Nick Hornby

38. “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

39. “We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Book Quotes

40. “Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.”

— Nick Hornby

41. “I couldn’t bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.”

— Nick Hornby

42. “You wouldn’t believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.”

— Nick Hornby

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “I’m simply pointing out that what happens to us isn’t the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we’re not together.”

— Nick Hornby

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

47. “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

48. “It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.”

— Nick Hornby

49. “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

50. “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