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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

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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
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Telephone
Head
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Pointless
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Explain
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More quotes by Nick Hornby

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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
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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.
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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
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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
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The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
Nick Hornby
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It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.
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An official statement from Liverpool raised the spectre of a future where 'a club's rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation'. But on hearing this, many Manchester United fans would have been asking for a definition of the word 'rival'.
Nick Hornby
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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
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...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.
Nick Hornby
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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
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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
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What harm has he ever done to you?' 'You know what harm he's done me. He offended me with his terrible taste.
Nick Hornby
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Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.
Nick Hornby
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...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.
Nick Hornby
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Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.
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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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
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And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.
Nick Hornby
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Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having - a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say.
Nick Hornby
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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