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" 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

Books

Best

Music

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

" I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success. "

" 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. "

" It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that. "

Nick Hornby

You

Sick

" Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. "

" Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did. "

Nick Hornby

Talking

People

" The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication. "

" The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel. "

Nick Hornby

Writing

Work

" My relationships are fairly stable. "

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

Nick Hornby

Write

Three

" There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.' "

" The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore. "

" The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. "

" 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.' "

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

" I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I didn't really want to write about music very much in 'High Fidelity.' I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with. "

" 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. "

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

" At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times. "

" I only want to write books and movies about women. "

" Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment. "

" If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it. "

" I think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way. "