Nick Hornby

"I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers' Hose, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof, but I didn't blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me?"

"But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it."

"And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into."

"I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it sometime. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes."

"Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax."

"Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness."

"I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it."

"By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do."

"As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive."

"Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs."

"I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains."

"Then I lost it. Kinda lost it all, you know. Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds."

"There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while."

"Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them all over London — they were the best invention Will had ever heard of."

"Each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before."

"These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and ... and it was too late."

"And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile alot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody."

"What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?"

"I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing... Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.""

"Wir alle wenden so viel Zeit dafür auf, nicht zu sagen, was wir wollen, weil wir wissen, dass wir es nicht kriegen können. Und weil es unhöflich wäre, illoyal, kindisch oder banal."

"Man kann sich über jeden lustig machen, der unglücklich ist, man muss nur grausam genug sein."

"Ich verliebte mich in den Fußball, wie ich mich später in Frauen verlieben sollte: plötzlich, unerklärlich, unkritisch und ohne einen Gedanken an den Schmerz und die Zerrissenheit zu verschwenden, die damit verbunden sein würden."