Quote

Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.

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
Feels
Critical
Flaw
Kind
Line
Dubious
Emotional
Correctness
Emotion
Represents
Lines
Orthodox
Form
Flaws
Self
Artistic
Feel
Pity
Ignoble

More quotes by Nick Hornby

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You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in.
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.
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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.
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You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.
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Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.
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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In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of This is me!
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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When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.
Nick Hornby
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Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.
Nick Hornby
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It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.
Nick Hornby
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[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.
Nick Hornby
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Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad.
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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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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The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads.
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 burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.
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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I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.
Nick Hornby