Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nick Hornby
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: April 17
Essayist
Film Producer
Lyricist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Nicholas Peter John Hornby
Proper
Find
Definitions
Whole
Drive
Writing
Writers
Good
Build
Crazy
Coherent
Looking
Constitutes
Anything

More quotes by Nick Hornby

Image
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
Image
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
Image
One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.
Nick Hornby
Image
What good were real feelings anyway?
Nick Hornby
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
(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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of This is me!
Nick Hornby
Image
What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
Nick Hornby
Image
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
Image
Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.
Nick Hornby
Image
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
Image
I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.
Nick Hornby
Image
It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.
Nick Hornby
Image
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
Image
Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.
Nick Hornby