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High Fidelity

Book by Nick Hornby · 13 quotes · Ifs, People, Knows

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High Fidelity Quotes

“Hope you didn't bring any spiders into the van with you,' Simon put in. 'Hey, I'm thinking we could take you back outside and hose you down, just to make sure. You'd definitely smell better if we did, which, I mean, bonus.' Jeremy scraped both hands through his hair again, then beat them clean against his thighs. 'Believe me, Simon, if we had access to a garden hose, I'd be the first to turn it on myself. I feel foul.' 'Hate to break it to you, Archer, but that feeling is not lying to you,' Simon said with mild relish.”

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“What am I? Average. A middleweight. Not the brightest bloke in the world, but certainly not the dimmest. I have read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and understood them, I think (they were about girls, right?), but I don't like them very much; my all-time top five favourite books are The Big Sleep my Raymond Chandler, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and, I don't know, something by William Gibson, or Kurt Vonnegut. I read the Guardian and the Observer as well as the NME and music glossies; I am not averse to going down to Camden to watch subtitled films (top five subtitled films: Betty Blue, Subway, Tie Me Down!, The Vanishing, Diva), although on the whole I prefer American films, and therefore the best films ever made: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Reservoir Dogs.) I'm ok looking... a girlfriend once told me I looked a bit like Peter Gabriel, and he's not too bad, is he? I'm average height, not slim, not fat, no unsightly facial hair, I keep myself clean, wear jeans and T-shirts and a leather jacket more or less all the time apart from in the summer when I leave the leather jacket at home. I vote Labour. I have a pile of classic comedy videos... I can see what feminists are on about, most of the time, but not the radical ones. My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one company frame. I'd say that there were millions like me, but there aren't, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don't read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humour but look like Woody Allen. Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don't do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don't have.”

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“Read any women's magazine and you'll see the same complaint over and over again: men - those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on - are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in "foreplay"; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can't help feeling, are ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren't interested. They didn't want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried. It's not really very suprising, then, that we're not much good at all that. We spent two or three long and extremely formative years being told very forcibly not even to think about it. 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. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay - mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.) The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year-old boy.”

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“I'm happy being a bloke, I think, but sometimes I'm not happy being a bloke in the late-twentieth century. Sometimes I'd rather be my dad. He never had to worry about delivering the goods, because he never knew that there were any goods to deliver; he never had to worry about how he ranked in my mother's all-time hot one hundred, because he was first and last on the list. Wouldn't it be great if you could talk about this sort of thing with your father? One day, maybe, I'll try. "Dad, did you ever have to worry about the female orgasm in either it's clitoral or its (possibly mythical) vaginal form? Do you, in fact, know what the female organism is? What about the G-spot? What did 'good in bed' mean in the 1955, if it meant anything at all? When was oral sex imported to Britain? Do you envy me my sex life, or does it all look like terribly hard work to you?”

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