Top 140 Nick Hornby Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Nick Hornby

52. “It’s no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won’t find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.”

— Nick Hornby

53. “We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other’s bottoms, and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.”

— Nick Hornby

54. “We’re here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?”

— Nick Hornby

55. “I’d stay there, or not, and I’d eat, or not, and I’d drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn’t do wouldn’t matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.”

— Nick Hornby

56. “I have always been accused of taking the things I love – football, of course, but also books and records – much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.”

— Nick Hornby

57. “I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened – I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.”

— Nick Hornby

58. “Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they’re not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.”

— Nick Hornby

59. “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

60. “Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.”

— Nick Hornby

61. “When your sad – like really sad – you only want to be with other people who are sad.”

— Nick Hornby

62. “Sometimes you know you’ve got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn’t so messed up, it wouldn’t be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn’t.”

— Nick Hornby

63. “You’re not allowed to say anything about books because they’re books, and books are, you know, God.”

— Nick Hornby

64. “Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.”

— Nick Hornby

65. “I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.”

— Nick Hornby

66. “I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.”

— Nick Hornby

67. “You can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you.”

— Nick Hornby

68. “When you’re unhappy, I guess everything in the world – reading, eating, sleeping – has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.”

— Nick Hornby

69. “Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.”

— Nick Hornby

70. “As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive.”

— Nick Hornby

71. “Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.”

— Nick Hornby

72. “I have a really low boredom threshold.”

— Nick Hornby

73. “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?”

— Nick Hornby

74. “I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn’t something I’m very good at.”

— Nick Hornby

75. “There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.”

— Nick Hornby

76. “Barry, you’re over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.”

— Nick Hornby

77. “The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.”

— Nick Hornby

78. “It’s just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself.”

— Nick Hornby

79. “I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: she hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.”

— Nick Hornby

80. “Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it’s just a drag, like a cold or having no money.”

— Nick Hornby

81. “I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.”

— Nick Hornby

82. “What good were real feelings anyway?”

— Nick Hornby

83. “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.”

— Nick Hornby

84. “I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids.”

— Nick Hornby

85. “Women who disapprove of men – and there’s plenty to disapprove of – should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.”

— Nick Hornby

86. “What you don’t catch a glimpse of on your wedding day- because how could you?- is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exhchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids.”

— Nick Hornby

87. “For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.”

— Nick Hornby

88. “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.”

— Nick Hornby

89. “I’d thought I’d live with my wife, but I couldn’t find one.”

— Nick Hornby

90. “I really don’t want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!”

— Nick Hornby

91. “By the early seventies I had become an Englishman – that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.”

— Nick Hornby

92. “And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do.”

— Nick Hornby

93. “If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.”

— Nick Hornby

94. “He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent.”

— Nick Hornby

95. “Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.”

— Nick Hornby

96. “It’s often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it’s as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.”

— Nick Hornby

97. “But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.”

— Nick Hornby

98. “Phone calls like ours only happen when you’ve spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.”

— Nick Hornby

99. “The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone.”

— Nick Hornby

100. “He’d told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn’t offered morphine.”

— Nick Hornby