Nick Hornby

“You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.”

“I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?'”

“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.”

“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.”

“my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.”

“Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.”

“I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.”

“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.”

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

“I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.”

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

“Read any women's magazine and you'll see the same complaint over and over again: men - those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on - are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in "foreplay"; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can't help feeling, are ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren't interested. They didn't want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried. It's not really very suprising, then, that we're not much good at all that. We spent two or three long and extremely formative years being told very forcibly not even to think about it. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay - mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.) The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year-old boy.”

“It seems to me now that 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.”

“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.”

“ניק הורנבי תמיד האמין שגיל הוא לא עניין כרונולוגי. מי שיצר במו ידיו את אחד מאבות הטיפוס הגבריים של המאה ה־20: הגבר הנוירוטי הממאן להתבגר.”