"It's Only Just Beginning To Occur To Me That It's Important To Have Something Going on Somewhere,

at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on. ... You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?"

- Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (Victoria Gollancz Ltd., 1995)

"To Me, Making a [Mix-]Tape Is Like Writing a Letter

- there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, ... A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention ... and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, ... and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh, there are loads of rules."

 - Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (Victoria Gollancz Ltd., 1995)

"Is It So Wrong, Wanting To Be Home with Your Record Collection?

It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music."

 - Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (Victoria Gollancz Ltd., 1995)