Nick Hornby Quotes

Author Image

Nick Hornby

Profession : Writer

Birth : April 17, 1957

The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you're not listening, you're not going to have any fun reading.

Nick Hornby

If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s.

Nick Hornby

I think the moment you're writing about somebody who's not exactly you, then the challenge is all equal.

Nick Hornby

My computer is littered with abandoned projects.

Nick Hornby

In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.

Nick Hornby

I think it's weird when you become rich at 40.

Nick Hornby

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

Nick Hornby

However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.

Nick Hornby

One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time.

Nick Hornby

It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music.

Nick Hornby

When most people come in from work, 95 percent of them reach for the remote control. Then they read before they go to sleep, to get off to sleep. They do that because reading feels like a duty, and TV feels like fun.

Nick Hornby

If it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book.

Nick Hornby

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.

Nick Hornby

I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible.

Nick Hornby

I think, always, with a new book, I get nervous. I think mostly it is because work is really important to me, and a book doing well is important because it buys you another one. Not because of the money but if you keep doing interesting work, work that people like, they will want you to do more, and offers that are interesting come in.

Nick Hornby

I would like to have a go at TV. I think, especially when you have kids, that you spend a lot of time watching telly, and you think, 'How come I'm not doing that?'

Nick Hornby

I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.

Nick Hornby

I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.

Nick Hornby

I kind of stumbled on the material for 'An Education' and thought it would make a good movie, and one of the things that came out of that, for me, was that I learned that if you write a big part for a girl or a young woman, you get the opportunity to work with the best talent in the world.

Nick Hornby

The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.

Nick Hornby