Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby
Nicholas Peter John "Nick" Hornbyis an English novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy. Hornby's work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide as of 2009...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 April 1957
next-week unhappy london
I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?
hopeless
It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.
temperature trouble
But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
narrative behind-you bunch
The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
suicide virginia orange
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.
romance dip metaphor
It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself
live-life emotional unhappy
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.
one-day humans millions
Human beings are millions of things in one day.
truth-will-set-you-free noses confessing
The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.
scratches morphine crosses
He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.
sadness feelings trying
She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.
suicidal people far-away
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.
walks
You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.
breakup real love-you
I've seen men like you in Doris Day films, but I never thought they existed in real life...The men who can't commit, who can't say 'I love you' even when they want to, who start to cough and sputter and change the subject. But here you are. A living, breathing specimen. Incredible.