Nick Hornby Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.' 'Too stupid.' 'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?' 'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.' 'Exactly.' 'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought. 'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food. About a Boy

2. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. A Long Way Down

3. It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone. How to Be Good

4. Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn't.

5. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives. High Fidelity

6. 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... How to Be Good

7. A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners. High Fidelity

8. But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings. High Fidelity

9. contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. The Polysyllabic Spree

10. Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? Juliet, Naked

11. It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone. How to Be Good

12. It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a 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.

13. It wasn't that he made her feel incompetent and unsure of herself and her tastes. It was the reverse. He knew nothing about anything, and she'd never really allowed herself to notice it until now. Juliet, Naked

14. It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

15. 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. About a Boy

16. You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended. About a Boy