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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
Head
Messages
Telephones
Kind
Asking
Pointless
Way
Answer
Signals
Thinking
Number
Phone
Numbers
Phones
Answers
Engaged
Dialing
System
Explain
Signal
Either
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Telephone

More quotes by Nick Hornby

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I really don't want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!
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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.
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Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.
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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?
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my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.
Nick Hornby
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He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. Always tell your kids they have siblings... He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.
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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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But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
Nick Hornby
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Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)
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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.
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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
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The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.
Nick Hornby
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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
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You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
Nick Hornby
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[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.
Nick Hornby
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Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.
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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Clockers asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading Clockers by Richard Price)
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But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.
Nick Hornby
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I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.
Nick Hornby