Quote

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.

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
Song
Whistle
Nothing
Consuming
Much
Wit
Made
Leaves
Make
None
Time
Songs
Life
Anybody
Talent
Messier

More quotes by Nick Hornby

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[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?
Nick Hornby
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I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.
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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(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
Nick Hornby
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contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.
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!)
Nick Hornby
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...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.
Nick Hornby
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When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.
Nick Hornby
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And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.
Nick Hornby
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The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
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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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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On New Year's Eve he ould make a resolution to recover some his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at people even if he disapproved of them
Nick Hornby
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You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.
Nick Hornby
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I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal.
Nick Hornby
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Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
Nick Hornby
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Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.
Nick Hornby
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When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.
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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Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.
Nick Hornby