David Nicholls Quotes

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

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

Be nice wont you?" "I am nice, I'm always nice." "But not too nice. I mean don't make a religion out of it, niceness.

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.

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

Envy was just the tax you paid on success.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 . . . .

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Don’t keep fighting battles that are already lost.

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

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.

The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no one had noticed her arrival, and would notice if she left.

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.

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

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

Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.

The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.

...and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind