It Depends on whether You Were Born to

In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That's OK; he's a songwriter, after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot - how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway.

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, p. 136 (ch. 11)

The Songwriter's Disease

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning, and he'd managed to do that with just about everybody he'd ever met or married or fathered. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked, p. 244 (ch. 15)

George W. Bush in a Nutshell?

I read about a third of Bush at War, and I may well return to it at some stage, but the mood that compelled me to begin it passed quickly, and in any case it wasn't quite what I wanted: Woodward's tone is way too matey and sympathetic for me. I did, however, learn that George W. Bush was woken up by the Secret Service at 11:08 p.m. on 9/11. Woken up! He didn't work late that night? And he wasn't too buzzy to get off to sleep? See, if that had been me, I would have been up until about six, drinking and smoking and watching TV, and I would have been useless the next day. It can't be right, can it, that world leaders emerge not through their ability to solve global problems, but to nod off at the drop of a hat? Most decent people can't sleep easily at night, and that, apparently, is precisely why the world is in such a mess.

Nick Hornby, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Ch. "November 2003"; p. 33

The Perils of Football

For me, 79/80 was a season when football - always hitherto the backbone of life - provided the entire skeleton. For the whole season I did nothing else apart from go to the pub, work (in a garage outside Cambridge, because I could think of nothing better to do), hang out with my girlfriend, whose course lasted a year longer than mine, and wait for Saturdays and Wednesdays. The extraordinary thing was that Arsenal in particular seemed to respond to my need for as much football as possible: they playes seventy games that season, twenty-eight of them cup-ties of one kind or another. Every time I gave an indication of becoming more listless than was good for me, Arsenal obliged by providing another match.

By April 1980 I was sick to death of my job, and my indecision, and myself.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (Chapter "Filling a Hole", p. 117)