Nick Hornby Quotes

Author Image

Nick Hornby

Profession : Writer

Birth : April 17, 1957

I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.

Nick Hornby

People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with.

Nick Hornby

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

Nick Hornby

I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.

Nick Hornby

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

Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever.

Nick Hornby

Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do.

Nick Hornby

If you can get every kid to have found a book that he or she loves, then you've done a great job.

Nick Hornby

Jeremy Corbyn has proved popular with young voters in part because he has promised an end to austerity.

Nick Hornby

When someone says they've read your book 15 times, you think, 'Well, you should read something else.'

Nick Hornby

I have boys, and boys are particularly resistant to reading books. I had some success recently with Sherman Alexie's great young adult novel 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian.' I told my son it was highly inappropriate for him and one of the most banned books in America. That got his attention, and he raced through it.

Nick Hornby

Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine.

Nick Hornby

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

Nick Hornby

With 'Brooklyn,' I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I just had a very strong sense that if I turned the volume up a little bit, it could be something really special.

Nick Hornby

Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person.

Nick Hornby

When you're adapting a novel, there are always scenes taken out of the book, and no matter which scenes they are, it's always someone's favorite. As a screenwriter, you realize, 'Well, it doesn't work if you include everyone's favorite scenes.'

Nick Hornby

I only want to write books and movies about women.

Nick Hornby

Why are we scared of a '50s weepie? Why are we scared of a movie that pulls you in and punches you in the stomach?

Nick Hornby

We don't feel duty-bound to get all the way through a TV program. If we're not enjoying it, we turn over. Movies, we tend to give more of the benefit of the doubt because they're only 90 minutes or two hours. But books, there is this thing of, 'It's a book. I've got to finish it.'

Nick Hornby

Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over.

Nick Hornby