David Nicholls quotes:

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  • I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.

  • This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.

  • I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.

  • I worry sometimes that I'm a bit moralistic; always writing about men who are learning to grow up, not be so self-absorbed, selfish or badly behaved. I wonder if that's dull and liberal and wimpy? I should probably write something that celebrates wickedness.

  • Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.

  • Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

  • Most of the books and films I love walk a knife edge between romance and cynicism, and I wanted 'One Day' to stay on that line. I wanted it to be moving, but without being manipulative.

  • For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

  • It's scented! Your wedding invitations are scented?It's meant to be lavender.No, Dex - it's money. It smells of money.

  • There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.

  • Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

  • I would never complain about 'One Day' taking off, but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.

  • If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

  • I think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it's easier, isn't it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.

  • I love that sound,' he mumbled into her hair. 'Blackbirds at dawn.' 'I hate it. Makes me think I've done something I'll regret.

  • Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.

  • Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.

  • Well, I don't think Hollywood's a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films.

  • He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.

  • Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we'd actually "done it properly," which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.

  • A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.

  • An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they're missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.

  • I'm not the consolation prize, Dex. I'm not something you resort to. I happen to think I'm worth more than that.

  • I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

  • I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.

  • I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.

  • Keep the change, he smiled. Was there ever a more empowering phrase than Keep the change?

  • She was always going to be the smartest, kindest, funniest, loyalest person we would ever meet, and the fact of her not being here well it just isn't right

  • And they did have fun, though it was of different kind now. All that yearning and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant."

  • You've got to stop letting women slip drugs into your mouth, Dex, it's unhygienic. And dangerous. One day it'll be a cyanide capsule.

  • Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you

  • The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts - first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you're left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.

  • Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance

  • She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.

  • You know what i can't understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, i mean endlessly, i've been telling you for years. So why don't you believe it? why do you think people say that stuff, Em? Do you think it's a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice about you?

  • She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.

  • As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.

  • Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.

  • As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.

  • Sorry' he said. 'No, I'm sorry.' 'What are you sorry for?' 'Rattling on like a mad old cow. I'm sorry, I'm tired, bad day, and I'm sorry for being so...boring.' 'You're not that boring.' 'I am, Dex. God, I swear I bore myself.' 'Well, you don't bore me.' He took her hand in his. 'You could never bore me. You're one in a million, Em.

  • ...Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

  • You feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that's okay that's alright because we're all meant to be like that at twenty-four.

  • Okay, well I think the programme is like being screamed at for an hour by a drunk with a strobe-light, but like I said--

  • I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades.

  • He swatted at her with his book. "Shut up and read, will you?"He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.

  • Keep the change," he smiled. Was there ever a more empowering phrase than "Keep the change"?

  • Who's he seeing now then?""No idea. They're like funfair goldfish; no point giving them names, they never last that long.

  • It's scented! Your wedding invitations are scented?""It's meant to be lavender.""No, Dex - it's money. It smells of money.

  • You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle

  • This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.

  • You can live your whole life not realizing that what you're looking for is right in front of you.

  • Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.''It's the most we can hope for.

  • Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.

  • But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!

  • The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

  • At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

  • She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

  • I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.

  • He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?

  • She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show?

  • As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.

  • Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?

  • I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things.

  • I still find it absurdly difficult to concentrate on a novel if there's a phone or computer to hand; I have taken to locking them outside the room like noisy pets.

  • When you're reading a book, you're always looking for the natural place to stop. With a movie, you can't really have that sense of it coming momentarily to a halt; there's pressure to keep the momentum up.

  • I usually write on a computer - unless I get stuck, at which point I switch to write by hand. I think that's common among writers if they get cornered on something.

  • My 20s was a sea of worry. I worried about benefit forms, about being thrown out of my flat. I never went on holiday because I thought: 'What if an audition comes up?' I was a nervous wreck.

  • When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment - and nor should they have done - about having a good time.

  • I think probably I'm quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I'm very embarrassed by sentiment. I'm very embarrassed by corniness.

  • Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I'll always remember it

  • I contemplate the idea that maybe I'm an alcoholic. I get this occassionally, the need to define myself as something-or-the-other, and at various times in my life have wondered if I'm a Goth, a homosexul, a Jew, a Catholic or a manic depressive, whether I am adopted, or have a hole in my heart, or possess the ability to move objects with the power of my mind, and have always, most regretfully, come to the conclusion that I'm none of the above. The fact is I'm actually not ANYTHING.

  • No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.

  • Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.

  • From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

  • These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.

  • Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you

  • Envy was just the tax you paid on success.

  • I'm trying to be inspiring! I'm trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you!

  • He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.

  • If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place

  • And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others

  • It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.

  • She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy

  • There's something unnatural about a woman finding babies or, more specifically, conversation about babies, boring. They'll think she's bitter, jealous, lonely. But she's also bored of everybody telling her how lucky she is, what with all that sleep and all that freedom and spare time, the ability to go on dates or head off to Paris at a moments notice. It sounds like they're consoling her, and she resents this and feels patronized by it.

  • She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

  • A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

  • To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

  • I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.

  • Well, it's so hard for books to take off. You give years of your life to something that probably won't happen, so when it does, it feels a little unjust.

  • David Holdaway was my stage name. I was an actor for about eight years in the '90s. I had to change my name because there was another David Nicholls, and I thought if I changed it to my mother's name, she'd be touched.

  • I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.

  • The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.

  • but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

  • Today. This bright new day that awaits us

  • Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.

  • The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.

  • She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates. but the combination of the retsina and sun made Emma feel sentimental and light-headed. She reached for her roller skates.

  • As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.

  • She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man

  • All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.

  • I can't believe it's actually happening. This is independent adulthood, this is what it feels like. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual? In certain remote African tribes there'd be some incredible four day rites of passage ceremony involving tattooing and potent hallucinogenic drugs extracted from tree-frogs, and village elders smearing my body with monkey blood, but here,rites of passage is all about three new pairs of pants and stuffing your duvet in a bin-liner.

  • ...maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and fuuny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or ABe North in Tender in the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager...

  • No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin.

  • Find the thing you love, and do it with all your heart, to the absolute best of your ability, no matter what people say.

  • I am not up to this. I am not capable. I thought I would be, but I'm not. Some part of me is missing, and I cannot do this.

  • Welcome to the graveyard of ambition

  • In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.

  • ...it's hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama...

  • Work hard at . . . something.

  • At some point youâ??ll have to get serious about life.

  • Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

  • Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.

  • And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared.

  • You must do what you enjoy.

  • He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.

  • Be good. Do something good.

  • Donâ??t keep fighting battles that are already lost.

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