Literary Birthday – 17 April – Nick Hornby

Happy Birthday, Nick Hornby, born 17 April 1957.

Nick Hornby Quotes

  1. The more you read about the value of literacy, the more you understand it’s everything, really. All statistics show the more kids read, the more likely they are to have successful lives.
  2. I don’t listen to music while I’m at the computer, but it is an important part of the working day—things tend to spark up better if I’m having an intense relationship with a song or an album.
  3. I don’t want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!
  4. 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.
  5. All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. … But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
  6. Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.
  7. Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.
  8. I started by writing plays. When I left university and I tried to write, everything came out sounding like bad essays, so I thought I should stick to dialogue. I hadn’t done enough reading-not of the things I wanted to emulate-so it took me a while, a long while, to grapple with voice. Everything changed for me when I read Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Lorrie Moore, all in about ‘86-‘87 … voice, tone, simplicity, humour, soul … all of these things seemed to be missing from the contemporary English fiction I’d looked at, and I knew then what I wanted to do.
  9. I’m a 9 to 5 writer—I never work on weekends or in the evenings. I have an office round the corner from my home, so I drop a kid off at school and walk down the road, where invariably I waste the first few hours of the day writing e-mails, playing Solitaire, reading sports news on the Internet.
  10. I think I do construct an ideal reader or listener. I always seem to think that I’m addressing some quite smart woman in her 30s. I don’t know why.

Nick Hornby is an English novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels, High Fidelity and About a Boy, as well as for the football memoir, Fever Pitch. His work touches on music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than five million copies worldwide. Nick also produces and writes screenplays. He has adapted Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn for the big screen. Visit his website here: Nick Hornby

Source for Image: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nick_Hornby_01_(cropped).jpg

 by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 17th April 2013
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