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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.

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
Writing
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Seemed
Manuals
Always
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Sibling
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Parenting
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Errors
Children
Child
Basic
Siblings

More quotes by 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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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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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
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A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You've got to kick off with a killer, to grab the attention. Then you've got to take it up a notch, or cool it off a notch…oh, there are a lot of rules.
Nick Hornby
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Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.
Nick Hornby
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You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.
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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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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Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.
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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...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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It takes a child to say the unsayable.
Nick Hornby
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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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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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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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It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.
Nick Hornby
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I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography Cash by Johnny C
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)
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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So now what? What happens when words fail us?
Nick Hornby