David Nicholls Quotes
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.
She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.
…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.
We're not ourselves, are we? I'm certainly not myself, not anymore. And you're not either. You don't seem yourself. Not as I remember you.
…and you smile back and try not to think about the fact that you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to say to each other.
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.
I would never complain about One Day taking off but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.
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.
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.
The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.
I'm just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.' 'Treated like what?' She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. 'Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.
As a matter of fact, I think there are more things important in life than "relationships.
Imagine staying awake all night not because you're worried about the future but because it's FUN
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.
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.
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.
The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.
Find the thing you love, and do it with all your heart, to the absolute best of your ability, no matter what people say.
In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.
I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.
He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.
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.
At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.
And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.
For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . .