Songbook Quotes

“I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably ...”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.”
― Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

“It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are perfectly. And they don’t do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or worse. It’s a process something like falling in love. You don’t necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest, or the most beautiful; there’s something else going on. There was a part of me that would rather have fallen for Updike or Kerouac, or DeLillo – for someone masculine, or at least, maybe somebody a little more opaque, and certainly someone who uses more swearwords- and, though I have admired those writers, at various stages in my life, admiration is a very different thing from the kind of transference I’m talking about. I’m talking about understanding – or at least feeling like I understand- every artistic decision, every impulse, the soul of both the work and its creator. “This is me,” I wanted to say when I read Tyler’s rich, sad, lovely novel. “I’m not a character, I’m nothing like the author, I haven’t had the experiences she writes about. But even so, this is what I feel like, inside. This is what I would sound like, if I ever I were to find a voice.” And I did find a voice, eventually, and it was mine, not hers; but nevertheless, so powerful was the process of identification that I still don’t feel as though I’ve expressed myself as well, as completely, as Tyler did on my behalf.”
― Nick Hornby , Songbook

“In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can’t we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer?”
― Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

“We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“One can only presume that people who say that their favorite record of all time reminds them of their honeymoon in Corsica, or of their family Chihuahua, don't actually like music very much.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“that night taught me one of life’s most useful lessons, one of the only pieces of advice I have to offer to younger generations: YOU’RE ALLOWED TO WALK OUT!”
― Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

“Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I've loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can't believe that there'll be another one. Yet there always is, and I can't wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you've got a life worth living.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“There are many ways in which songs differ from books, but both songwriters and novelists are looking for material that will somehow mean something beyond itself, something that contains echoes and ironies and texture and complication.
something both timely and timeless”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t listen to classical music or jazz very often, and when people ask me what music I like, I find it very difficult to reply, because they usually want names of people, and I can only give them song titles. And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“Recently I have been attacked in newspapers by two 'fabulist' writers, as far as I can make out for the ordinariness of the worlds I portray. To which the most obvious reply is that it's all very well writing about elves and dragons and goddesses rising out of the ground and the rest of it--who couldn't do that and make it colorful? (Readable, of course, is another matter...) But writing about pubs and struggling singer-songwriters--well, that's hard work. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, and yet, somehow, I have to persuade you that something is happening somewhere in the hearts and minds of my characters, even though they're just standing there drinking beer and making jokes about Peter Frampton.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“I will always be grateful to her for creating in me the narcotic need to hear her song again and again. It is, after all, a harmless need, easily satisfied, and there are few enough of those in the world.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“All sorts of pieces of music are constantly being described as ‘sexy’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d want them to accompany lovemaking. Most of them, in fact, are sexual substitutes, rather than sexual accompaniments – music for people who aren’t getting any (or won’t be until they get home) rather than people who are.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“How could there be a bad song called ‘Iron Man’, or ‘War Pigs’, or – my cup ranneth over – ‘Rat Salad’?”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I’ve loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can’t believe that there’ll be another. Yet there always is, and I can’t wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you’ve got a life worth living.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“We’re sitting in my back garden on a hot summer night, eating barbecued chicken and listening to Todd Rundgren, when a friend suddenly explodes into a rant about pop music.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“When I say that you can hear God in ‘One Man Guy’ by Rufus Wainwright, I do not mean to suggest that there is an old chap with a beard – a divine Willie Nelson, if you will – warbling along with them.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“Songs undressed like that, without a stitch of Stratocaster on them, are scary – you have to work them out for yourself.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“...there are occasions when I find the tinge of self-pity in the lyric immensely comforting. (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.)”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“É possível que esse tipo de habilidade passe despercebido porque "Smoke" é "apenas" uma canção, do mesmo modo que "Yesterday" ou "Something" não eram "apenas" canções.”
― Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

“Se conseguirmos ouvir Dylan e os Beatles em sua forma inequivocamente mais pura no seu auge - mas uma forma inequivocamente pura de um jeito que não ouvimos mil, um milhão de vezes antes - nós de repente obteremos um pequeno mas eletrizante lampejo do espírito deles e isso é o mais próximo que aqueles de nós nascidos na época errada chegaremos a saber de como deve ter sido ouvir essas músicas jorrando do rádio quando não se esperava por elas, nem por nada como aquilo.”
― Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

“(...) várias músicas lembram-me do colégio ou de ex-namoradas ou de um emprego de verão, mas não tenho apreço por nenhuma delas - nenhuma significa nada para mim como música, só como lembrança (...)”
― Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

“Similarly harmless are the albums by Lil' Romeo... Only you will know whether you want to listen to an album by an eleven-year-old rapper. "It's teen-age music, but it's also adult appealing," the biography on Lil' Romeo's Web site claims, but this seems extravagently hopeful, because it's hard to imagine that anyone in his teens would swallow this stuff, and it certainly didn't appeal to this particular adult. The intro features a version of "Frere Jacques;" track two is effectively a rap version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star;" and "Somebody's in Love" contains the line "Be my Mickey Mouse, and I'll be your Minnie.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“The truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it’s just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music, in songs, that bring me up short, make me do a double-take.”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook