He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent. Nick Hornby More Quotes by Nick Hornby More Quotes From Nick Hornby 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. Nick Hornby breakup break-up real There's no doubt that he's the biggest sports star in the world now. Nick Hornby stars doubt sports One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence. Nick Hornby arses able one-day The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. Nick Hornby fans disappointment football Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel. Nick Hornby should remember men 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. Nick Hornby nice girl real I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic. Nick Hornby legs missing might [...] 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 falling-in-love intelligent beautiful The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning. Nick Hornby song past thinking 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. Nick Hornby behind-you narrative bunch But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat. Nick Hornby temperature trouble It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong. Nick Hornby hopeless And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. Nick Hornby letters fun book …I've had a bad week." What's happened?" Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all. Nick Hornby happened week My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves. Nick Hornby fashion gay hair All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice. Nick Hornby reading brother book He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market. Nick Hornby sibling kids children 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. Nick Hornby orange virginia suicide But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on. Nick Hornby distance home school It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already. Nick Hornby reading air opportunity