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"I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path."
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"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."

"There is no other enjoyment like reading."

"Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes."

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

"Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book."

"Kindle, isn't it? the waitress asked. "I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I'm reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult's books. "Oh, probably not all of them, Wesley said. "Huh? Why not? "She's probably got another one done already. That's all I meant. "And James Patterson's probably written one since he got up this morning! she said, and went off chortling."

"I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned."
Explore more quotes by Nick Hornby

"That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself."

"I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too."

"Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini."

"That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away."

"There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything."

"The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

"I don't have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes-and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don't think jokes even belong in proper books. I won't bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature."

"It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself."

"There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them."

"It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead."
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