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" There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration. "

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" 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

Kind

Writing

Imagine

" Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is. "

" I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home. "

" I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty. "

" I always thought 'Of Mice and Men' was such a perfect book because there's nothing not to understand, but it's still really clever and moving and complicated, but everybody understands the complication. "

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

" 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

Money

Book

" I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life. "

" A lot of what 'Funny Girl' is about, for me, is the experience feeling very happy doing a certain thing with a certain group of people. That partly came about because of having really positive experiences writing movies. "

" I can remember my father gave me a huge history of football for my 12th birthday - I used to read that a lot. I can remember thinking it was cool that something I was interested in even had a history. Most things I loved didn't. "

Nick Hornby

Father

History

" The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" I'd say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college. "

" 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. "

" Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay. "

" 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. "

" I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right. "

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

" It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were. "