Nick Hornby
Fever Pitch is Nick Hornby's notable work, a title that has remained central to his reputation as a writer across several decades and disciplines.
Hornby was born on 17 April 1957 in Redhill and is a citizen of the United Kingdom. He was educated at Desborough College and later at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. From those beginnings he developed a career that has taken on multiple forms: he works as a novelist, an essayist, a screenwriter, a film producer, and a songwriter, conducting all of this work in the English language.
That range of roles reflects the breadth of what he has built over the course of his career. As a novelist and essayist he operates on the page; as a screenwriter and film producer he has worked in other registers entirely; as a songwriter he has extended his practice into yet another form. The disciplines are distinct, yet they share a single practitioner whose output moves across them with evident ease. Hornby's full name, Nicholas Peter John Hornby, is registered in the Library of Congress under the authorized label "Hornby, Nick," a designation that acknowledges the scope of a career pursued across more than one medium.
Fever Pitch stands as the work most closely associated with his name. It is the title the FACTS list identifies as his notable work, and it is the point of reference from which his broader career tends to be understood. For a writer who is also a screenwriter, a film producer, an essayist, and a songwriter, that single title continues to anchor his public identity, a concrete marker of where his reputation is most firmly grounded.
Quotes by Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby's insights on:
I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.
I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.
I would like to have a go at TV. I think, especially when you have kids, that you spend a lot of time watching telly, and you think, 'How come I'm not doing that?'
I think, always, with a new book, I get nervous. I think mostly it is because work is really important to me, and a book doing well is important because it buys you another one. Not because of the money but if you keep doing interesting work, work that people like, they will want you to do more, and offers that are interesting come in.
I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible.
I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.
I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language.
When most people come in from work, 95 percent of them reach for the remote control. Then they read before they go to sleep, to get off to sleep. They do that because reading feels like a duty, and TV feels like fun.