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" 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. "

Nick Hornby

King

You

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" Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. "

" I applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once. "

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

" 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.' "

" Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives. "

Nick Hornby

Football

Fill

" I couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record. "

" The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are. "

" Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one. "

" 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 love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough. "

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

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

" It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. "

" I used to be a teacher, and I know how difficult it is to strike a balance between focused conversation and an atmosphere which prevents creativity and thought. "

" 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

" With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made. "

Nick Hornby

Long

Made

" If you're 22 and got everything you want, what are you going to write about for the rest of your life? "

" Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories. "

Nick Hornby

Neat