You know that bad people can make great art, don’t you?’Said Annie.
‘Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.’
‘Dickens wasn’t nice to his wife.’
‘Dickens didn’t make a memoir called I’m Nice to My Wife.
Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. ... The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy.
Nick HornbyTag: high-fidelity
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Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?
Nick HornbyTag: relationships juliet-naked
I didn’t make a nuisance of myself, not until the end, anyway, and I never outstayed my welcome, not while there was still a welcome to be outstayed; but I was kind and sincere and thoughtful and devoted and I remembered things about her and I told her she was beautiful and bought her little presents that usually referred to a conversation we had had recently. None of this was an effort, of course, and none of it was done with any sense of calculation: I found it easy to remember things about her, because I didn’t think about anything else, and I really did think she was beautiful, and I would not have been able to prevent myself from buying her little presents, and I did not have to feign devotion. There was no effort involved. So when one of Charlie’s friends, a girl called Kate, said wistfully one lunchtime that she wished she could find somebody like me, I was surprised and thrilled. Thrilled because Charlie was listening, and it didn’t do me any harm, but surprised because all I had done was act out of self-interest.
And yet this was enough, it seemed, to turn me into someone desirable. Weird
Vorweg ein paar grundsätzliche Regeln:
1) Ich möchte keine Klagen hören, ich würde zu viel Geld für Bücher ausgeben, die ich dann doch nicht lese. Das weiß ich selbst. Ich habe stets die Absicht, sie mehr oder weniger alle zu lesen. Meine Absichten sind gut. Und schließlich ist es ja mein Geld. Ich wette, bei Ihnen ist es ähnlich.
We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?
Nick HornbyEven though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (‘If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do’), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something that they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterwards, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the candyfloss worthlessness clogging up your head.
Nick HornbyThe Marie bit is easy enough to understand, then. The Laura thing takes a bit more explaining, but what it is, I think, is this: sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. Marie’s the hopeful, forward part of it – maybe not her, necessarily, but somebody like her, somebody who can turn things around for me. (Exactly that: I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me.) And Laura’s the backward part, the last person I loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords I reinvent our time together, and, before I know it, we’re in the car trying to sing the harmonies on “Sloop John B” and getting it wrong and laughing. We never did that in real life. We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment.
Nick HornbyDuring the night, I have one of those dreams that aren’t really dreams at all, just stuff about Laura fucking Ray, and Marco fucking Charlie, and I’m pleased to wake up in the middle of the night, because it means stopping the dream. But the pleasure only lasts a few seconds and then everything sinks in: that somewhere Laura really is fucking Ray (maybe not exactly now, because it’s 3:56 a.m., although with his stamina – his inability to climax, ha ha – you never know), and I’m here, in this stupid little flat, on my own, and I’m thirty-five years old, and I own a tiny failing business, and my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost And if I went back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in an old people’s home, I wouldn’t worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e. the rest of it, would be over. And I wouldn’t even have had to kill myself.
Nick HornbyAnd she liked me. She liked me. She liked me. She liked me. Or at least, I think she did. I think she did. Etc.
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