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The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.

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
Unhelpful
Temperament
Artistic
Product
Particularly
Products
Ends

More quotes by 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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Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.
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.
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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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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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.
Nick Hornby
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People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
Nick Hornby
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Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.
Nick Hornby
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I'd thought I'd live with my wife, but I couldn't find one.
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.
Nick Hornby
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Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD - the electrifying opening to I Got Loaded, which sounds like an R&B standard but isn't - when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin's wonderfully greasy sax.
Nick Hornby
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I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.
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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[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 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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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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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.
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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Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?' Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.
Nick Hornby
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I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.
Nick Hornby