Nick Hornby Quotes

And it's absolutely true that male sexual behaviour and female responses to male demands change a lot when they start communicating - and the levels of the communication that I've seen on the ground in very, very poor areas are so high and I think why don't we have that here?

When men are romantically interested in you, it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do.

You can't always understand if someone's into you or not, so you should never really pursue something too far without gauging that first.

It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of one's relationship with that person and how it can fail to influence that person.

When men have a smile on their faces, that does a lot for me.

There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor - all subtly different personas.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

Women tend to love men in their presence, while men tend to love women in their absence.

When someone asks, 'Why do you think he's not calling me?' there's always one answer - 'He's not interested.' There's not ever any other answer.

A real turnoff for guys is any girl who is way too into them. Like, you're being way too nice. Guys, as well as girls, like that sense of badness. I want a good girl, who can be a little bad.

John Brooke is acting dreadfully, and Meg likes it!

It's a basic, elemental universe, one of the last remaining zones where violence and domination sort out who is top dog. That's football's glory, and its curse. The game of football doesn't transfer well to the real world. You can't treat your friends, neighbors, or loved ones the way you treat your opponent on the football field.

It would be nice if people said, God bless you not just when you sneezed but also when you farted.

I don't know how people act. I've never understood that.

Wouldn't--" Kel began to say, but the words stuck in her mouth. She swallowed and tried again. "Wouldn't it be well, not nice to flirt with somebody you don't want to fall in love with?

If your only nice to the people that are nice to you, big deal; what do you want, a gist certificate? Everyone does that. And if you only say "hi" in the hall to the people that say hi to you, what are doing more than anyone else? Maybe you know people who are different when they're alone than when they're with their friends. they might say "hi" to you if your alone, but with a group they act like they've never seen you.

People say when you're in love, you don't need etiquette. Well, you need it then more than anything. Or they say, "At home I can just be myself." What they mean is they can be their worst selves... They always mean they will save all their anxiety about how to behave for somebody like the head waiter of a restaurant, someone they'll never see again.

There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'.

I don't have much time for stories," Vin said. "Seems that fewer and fewer people do, these days." A canopy kept off the ash, but he seemed unconcerned about the mists. "It makes me wonder what is so alluring about the real world that gives them all such a fetish for it. It's not a very nice place these days.

The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.

Now, we can live in this little, liberal bubble bath where everybody's supposed to like everybody and do all this stuff and understand our pain and know our history. But that, maybe, works in your dorm, that doesn't work in the real world, and people need to get out of all that.

He gave her his phone number, in a peculiar reversal of dating procedure. She might have considered kissing him, even after the horrible first date, but he just didn’t seem to know what to do. However, Jeremy does have one outstanding quality. He likes her. And this quality in a person makes them infinitely interesting to the person who is being liked.

The challenge of manners is not so much to be nice to someone whose favor and/or person you covet (although more people need to be reminded of that necessity than one would suppose) as to be exposed to the bad manners of others without imitating them.