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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

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Nick Hornby
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: April 17
Essayist
Film Producer
Lyricist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Nicholas Peter John Hornby
Becomes
Question
Good
Badness
Cope

More quotes by Nick Hornby

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...So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.
Nick Hornby
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One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.
Nick Hornby
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I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.
Nick Hornby
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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
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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
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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
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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
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...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.
Nick Hornby
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We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?
Nick Hornby
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Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.
Nick Hornby
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A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.
Nick Hornby
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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
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A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.
Nick Hornby
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Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.
Nick Hornby
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All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
Nick Hornby
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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
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So now what? What happens when words fail us?
Nick Hornby
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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
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So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.
Nick Hornby
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I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
Nick Hornby