|
4d22561
|
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 |
|
5777f88
|
During the night, I have one of those dreams that aren't really dreams at all, just stuff about Laura fucking Ray, and Marco fucking Charlie, and I'm pleased to wake up in the middle of the night, because it means stopping the dream. But the pleasure only lasts a few seconds and then everything sinks in: that somewhere Laura really is fucking Ray (maybe not exactly now, because it's 3:56 a.m., although with his stamina - his inability to cl..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
b99bb1b
|
Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends, it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was reciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
45e3744
|
H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?
|
|
women
|
Nick Hornby |
|
232c2d7
|
Do I want to be like him? Not really, I don't think. But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I'm unhappy, or whether I'm unhappy because I like.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
a05ccc4
|
There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
c3483f5
|
because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you're prepared to go that extra two inches, and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different -- oh, I would have done it if she hadn't been there or he hadn't been there or if someone hadn't sat on my head -- but that fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we'd all had ample opportunity not to be.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
8da2731
|
Read anything, as long as you can't wait to pick it up again.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
97a47b6
|
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 |
|
5136af5
|
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 |
|
5a4ea30
|
How come every squitty little shitty snotty bastard knows my name?
|
|
relationships
personalities
|
Nick Hornby |
|
3c5f10b
|
If you've found the right person, you've found the right person, it doesn't matter how old you are.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
f070dd4
|
When I went back into the kitchen, I wanted to sit on my mum's lap. I know that sounds stupid and babyish , but I couldn't help it. On my sixteenth birthday, I didn't want to be sixteen, or fifteen or anyteen. I wanted to be three or four, and too young to make any kind of mess
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
2074d9e
|
One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that's true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.... Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it's still, in any given four week period, way, way more likely you'll find a great book that you haven't read than a great..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
eac2e2a
|
It's easier to have parents if you've got a girlfriend.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
27a96b4
|
I hope that when people are happy together, it feels as though someone keeps piling seconds and thirds on their plates.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
6508cf7
|
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are suppose to go.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
de2de3f
|
Zaid's finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more." That's me! And you, probably! That's us!"
|
|
readers
|
Nick Hornby |
|
692d12f
|
What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands-- literally thousands-- of songs about broken h..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
fd6d9fc
|
They're not me, but I wish I was them. Maybe not them, exactly, because they're not so happy either. But I wish I was one of those people, the people who know what to say, the people who can't see the difference. Because it seems to me that you have more chance of being able to live a life you can stand if you're like that.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
34a2c0c
|
I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at nay time of the day r year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they've come to represent the trumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain.
|
|
humor
london
|
Nick Hornby |
|
7ded203
|
Why should we be denied basic human rights just because we've messed up our relationships?
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
70dd89f
|
My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren't they? I know they didn't invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Any..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
6dcfe81
|
It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
7ef762c
|
You see the profound effect literature can have on life? Who says it's all a waste of time? If only I could produce one book that left someone with that kind of ferocious grievance. If you have read one of my books, you probably feel cheated out of however much money it might have cost you, and you'll certainly begrudge the time you wasted on it. But even at my most bullish and self-aggrandizing, I can't quite make myself believe that I've ..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
15b2d1c
|
You'd think that even a bad doctor on a bad day would feel better than a good drug dealer on a good day, but I suspect that this might not be true. I suspect that drug dealers have days when everything clicks, and it's all buzz buzz buzz, and they chalk off their jobs one by one, and they return home with a sense of accomplishment.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
d381ddc
|
Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
dd490e9
|
He'd still be who he was, and that, it seemed to him, was the basic problem.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
af56df6
|
What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad, and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but "love" would have to do for now."
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
73277cc
|
But later, just as we're turning the corner into my road, and I'm beginning to panic about the pain and difficulty of the impending conversation, I see a woman on her own, Saturday-night-smart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed... what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, *going out of her way*, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, wearing more makeup tha..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
84aa87d
|
In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
58888f5
|
I'd never really had arguments like this before, arguments I couldn't understand properly, arguments where both sides were right and wrong all at the same time.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
2ae7946
|
We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes - usually late at night, in bed - he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I'd socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
575cd14
|
She began to fear that she would always be greedy, all the time. Nothing ever seemed to fill her up. Nothing ever seemed to touch the sides.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
062039d
|
I'm still pretty sick about what I've lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I'm not the best sleeper.
|
|
loss
|
Nick Hornby |
|
4f2f657
|
Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
269bb14
|
But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
ec69447
|
opinion. Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn't tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
1c7dd82
|
Do you need someone to talk to?" she said gently. "Oh. Thank you. No, no, I'm fine." He touched his face - he'd been crying harder than he'd realized. "You sure? You don't look fine." "No, really. I've just . . . I've just had a very intense emotional experience." He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. "On here." "You're crying about music?" The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert. "We..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
733a37b
|
Just about everyone I've ever interviewed has told me that by doing something or other--recovering from cancer, climbing a mountain, playing the part of a serial killer in a movie--they have learned something about themselves. And I always nod and smile thoughtfully, when really I want to pin them down: What did you learn from the cancer, actually? That you don't like being sick? That you don't want to die? That wigs make your scalp itch? C..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
1926bd7
|
It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
c980ab2
|
Few of us have chosen our clubs, they have simply been presented to us; and so as they slip from Second Division to the Third, or sell their best players, or buy players who you know can't play, or bash the ball the seven hundreth time towards a nine foot centre-forward, we simply curse, go home, worry for a fortnight and then come back to suffer all over again.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
ae0f821
|
I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.
|
|
reading
writing
science
|
Nick Hornby |
|
bbea5fb
|
Is there anything more adult than sticking with a relationship that's falling apart in the hope that you can put it right? I've never done that in my life.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |