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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
Temperament
Artistic
Product
Particularly
Products
Ends
Unhelpful

More quotes by 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.
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We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.
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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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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This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.
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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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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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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It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.
Nick Hornby
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And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.
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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It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.
Nick Hornby
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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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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