Nick Hornby Quotes

The only way you can continue to make artistic films is to make an occasional one of those. They kind of keep your marketability going to the extent that people will employ you.

All filmmakers want the option to make another film, to have it not always be such an uphill battle - for it to be our life, our working life.

I'd rather excite the imagination of a legion of readers and make pennies from each of them than hold off for a larger chunk of change from only a handful of fans.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.

I think when you've had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you've already proven yourself. They're excited about what you're doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It's empowering.

From the very beginning, I envisioned success as selling enough books so I could keep getting published and continue to write what I wanted to without compromising.

I get to do interesting roles and make a living.

I'm at a point where I don't have to wait for the income from the record to survive, so I'm in a comfortable zone, but I'll make rap records as long as I feel I have something to rap about.

One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes back; nothing is lost.

Being an indie queen, people think I have all these choices. Like I've just been sitting around waiting for the best indie film that I deem acceptable.

I'm in the position where I don't have to make commercial music to feed myself, so I have the luxury of being more experimental, if that's what I choose to do. I guess I've earned the right by being in the business for a while and paying the dues and taking the lumps.

After I got back my career and my artistic freedom in 1982, my golden rule is the music must never suffer.

I don't want to plan my career. That would be a business plan. Filmmaking is not a business plan.

I just want to work and have the freedom to put my voice out there, and I want to interact with my fans and my followers.

When you write a novel or paint a picture, you have the opportunity to approach it and back off, tear up pages, write, rewrite, paint over, and come back to it. In film, once you start shooting, you can't restart the clock, and you keep moving forward, and you don't look back, and you don't go back. And that is, of course, antithetical to the creative process. It's really hard to generate a comfortable creative flow under that kind of pressure.

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about. They're an escape.

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears.

One of the things about what . . . I do - writing plays - is that a poll is not taken before you say, Well, I'm going to write this because I think that you're going to like this and therefore you'll buy a ticket for this.

With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one's reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

So in that way, fame has become a weirder thing to go after, but the thing about me is I've never been after fame. That sounds cliché, but it's true. I think fame sounds uncomfortable to me, but being able to like write this book and make my living doing very exciting, creative stuff sounds really amazing. It has been really amazing.

I prefer to write and draw in the privacy of my home and with total freedom and then take it to the lion's den.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

I must say, in the case of "Room," both the book and the film, I don't think being a lesbian author held me back at all.