David Nicholls quotes
-
You can live your whole life not realizing that what you're looking for is right in front of you.
-- David Nicholls -
This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.
-- David Nicholls -
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
-- David Nicholls -
Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I'll always remember it
-- David Nicholls -
-
Envy was just the tax you paid on success.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.
-- David Nicholls -
Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.
-- David Nicholls -
-
Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you
-- David Nicholls -
If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place
-- David Nicholls -
I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades.
-- David Nicholls -
He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.
-- David Nicholls -
-
It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.
-- David Nicholls -
No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
-
Well, I don't think Hollywood's a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
-
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
-- David Nicholls -
I've only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.
-- David Nicholls -
-
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.
-- David Nicholls -
But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!
-- David Nicholls -
It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.
-- David Nicholls -
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 . . . .
-- David Nicholls -
-
I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.
-- David Nicholls -
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 Nicholls -
-
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.
-- David Nicholls -
I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
-
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
I would never complain about 'One Day' taking off, but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.
-- David Nicholls -
-
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
-
Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.
-- David Nicholls -
-
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.
-- David Nicholls -
Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
-
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.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
She glanced across to where Tilly and her brand new husband were posing for photographs, Tilly fluttering a fan coquettishly in front of her face. 'Unfortunately I didn't realise there was a French Revolutionary theme.' 'The Marie-Antoinette thing?' said Dexter. 'Well at least we know there'll be cake.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
-
Oh you know me. I have no emotions. I'm a robot. Or a nun. A robot nun.
-- David Nicholls -
And then some days you wake up and everything's perfect
-- David Nicholls -
So must people hate their jobs.That's why they're called it jobs
-- David Nicholls -
Dont run before you can walk
-- David Nicholls -
-
I think reality is over-rated
-- David Nicholls -
Today. This bright new day that awaits us
-- David Nicholls -
She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man
-- David Nicholls -
And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others
-- David Nicholls -
-
Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.
-- David Nicholls -
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.
-- David Nicholls -
For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.
-- David Nicholls -
A moment passed, perhaps half a second when their faces said what they felt, and then Emma was smiling, laughing, her arms around his neck.
-- David Nicholls -
You may also like:
-
Anne Hathaway
Actress -
Charles Dickens
Writer -
David Mitchell
Novelist -
David Morrissey
Actor -
Jeremy Irvine
Film actor -
Jim Broadbent
Film actor -
Jim Sturgess
Actor -
Jojo Moyes
Novelist -
Karen Joy Fowler
Author -
Nicholas Sparks
Novelist -
Nick Hornby
Novelist -
Rafe Spall
Actor -
Romola Garai
Actress -
Sam Shepard
Playwright -
Sarah Waters
Novelist -
Sheridan Smith
Actress -
Simon Callow
Actor -
Thomas Hardy
Novelist -
Lone Scherfig
Film director -
Matthew Warchus
Director
