Nick Hornby Quotes

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

Shakespeare set a lot of his dramas in a historical perspective or war perspective, or he would study what was going on at that time.

As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.

People who, like me, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s after World War II, grew up with cars.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.

We loved the language in Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country,' which is really about the region, while in 'True Grit' it's more about period: people did speak more formally and floridly.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction. There's always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won't show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.

What I've appreciated about the 'Bond' films is there's always been a subtle social relevance to them. They've always commented on the times.

In the time we made 'To the 5 Boroughs,' there was a political seriousness because of what was happening in the world.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

Rereading 'Child 44' brought out the novel's meatier pleasures, its ability to create vivid characters in a world both alien to our own and chillingly recognizable.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

The '60s is such an explosive period. It was very interesting for me because I grew up in Canada, and obviously, I know some American history because I've lived here for many years, and even in Canada, that does permeate.

What 'Strong Island' does is bring a historical perspective and help people understand that what we're treating as a modern-day phenomenon is actually not modern. It's actually quite old.