Top 100 David Nicholls Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.
Freya North
#3. Recklessness, spontaneity didn't really suit her, she couldn't carry if off, the results were never what she hoped for.
David Nicholls
#4. We can just hang out and walk and read and talk and stuff.
David Nicholls
#5. The enemy, self-consciousness, is creeping up on them and Gibbsy or Biggsy is the first to crack, declaring that the music is shit and everyone stops dancing immediately as if a spell has been broken.
David Nicholls
#6. 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.
David Nicholls
#8. Who's he seeing now then?"
"No idea. They're like funfair goldfish; no point giving them names, they never last that long.
David Nicholls
#9. Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you
David Nicholls
#10. He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he 'thinks he might be in love with her', which is both more touching and easier to back out of.
David Nicholls
#11. 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.
David Nicholls
#12. Were helping build capability and capacity in the new Iraqi Navy
David Nicholls
#13. Why can't you just love me? Why can't you just be in love with me?
David Nicholls
#14. 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
#15. Who do you think you are, Jane Eyre? Grow up. Be sensible. Don't get carried away.
David Nicholls
#16. 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.
David Nicholls
#17. In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.
David Nicholls
#18. A sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?
David Nicholls
#19. So must people hate their jobs.That's why they're called it jobs
David Nicholls
#20. What must that be like? To be admired before you've even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you're like?
David Nicholls
#21. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately ,experience new things, love and be loved.
David Nicholls
#22. It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
David Nicholls
#23. At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that if you're a fan of Kate Bush, Charles Dickens, Scrabble, David Attenborough and University Challenge, then there's not much out there for you in terms of a youth movement.
David Nicholls
#24. But they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.
David Nicholls
#25. I'm trying to be inspiring! I'm trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you!
David Nicholls
#26. 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
David Nicholls
#27. But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.
David Nicholls
#28. Then they kiss again, and she goes to work, and he goes to work, and so the days go by, faster than ever.
David Nicholls
#29. Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.
David Nicholls
#30. Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page.
David Nicholls
#31. I had an infinite number of questions and would have been happy for her to recount her life in real time, would have been happy to walk on past Whitechapel and Limehouse into Essex and the estuary and on into the sea if she'd wanted to.
David Nicholls
#32. 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.
David Nicholls
#33. ... surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.
David Nicholls
#34. 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.
David Nicholls
#35. Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.
David Nicholls
#36. And I have a tiny little moment of anxiety, because I can't remember whether or not we're meant to be boycotting mars bars.
David Nicholls
#37. It had sometimes puzzled me why falling in love should be regarded as some wondrous event, accompanied by soaring strings, when it so often ended in humiliation, despair or acts of awful cruelty.
David Nicholls
#38. She shouldn't speak her thoughts; nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.
David Nicholls
#39. At some point you'll have to get serious about life.
David Nicholls
#40. 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.
David Nicholls
#41. Best to leave quietly, and no reunions. Move on, and look to the future. Plenty more faces out there.
David Nicholls
#42. And by the time the train pulls into the station, I find myself actually relieved that Emily's only a figment of my imagination.
David Nicholls
#43. Well, in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read it [ ... ]
David Nicholls
#44. I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades.
David Nicholls
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Paris was all so ... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French!
David Nicholls
#48. grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost. As
David Nicholls
#49. ... 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.
David Nicholls
#51. She liked to 'leave dishes to soak', an act of self-deception that I've always abhorred.
David Nicholls
#52. So do you think it's true what they say? About girls liking bastards?'
'He's not a bastard. He's an idiot.'
'Do girls like idiots then?
David Nicholls
#53. 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.
David Nicholls
#54. Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing "Non, je ne regrette rien" - which is more often than I'd like, now that I'm at university - I can't help thinking, What the hell is she talking about? I regret pretty much everything.
David Nicholls
#55. 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.
David Nicholls
#56. So? Most people hate their jobs. That's why they're called jobs.
David Nicholls
#57. Maybe if you listen to Radio 4 enough from an early age, you just get educated subliminally
David Nicholls
#58. Though not my field, I was familiar with the notion of alternative realities, but was not used to occupying the one I liked the best.
David Nicholls
#59. 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.
David Nicholls
#60. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed the most.
David Nicholls
#61. Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.
David Nicholls
#62. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.
David Nicholls
#63. This is me.'" He handed her the precious scrap of paper. 'Call me or I'll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it's not a competition. You don't lose if you phone first.
David Nicholls
#65. They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations.
David Nicholls
#69. Until now travel had always been a fraught affair. Each year until she was sixteen, it had been two weeks fighting with her sister in a caravan in Filey while her parents drank steadily and looked out at the rain, a sort of harsh experiment in the limits of human proximity.
David Nicholls
#70. The crucial thing about an education is the opportunity tat it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley
David Nicholls
#71. 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.
David Nicholls
#72. Sometimes I wish that I hadn't learned how to crochet, I say, and Alice laughs. Obviously she thinks I'm joking, which is maybe for the best.
David Nicholls
#74. 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
#76. While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries.
David Nicholls
#78. He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.
David Nicholls
#79. She could be breathing fire and I wouldn't mind.
'You could be breathing fire and I wouldn't mind,' I say.
David Nicholls
#80. She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy
David Nicholls
#81. You should visit the Palatine. It's at the top of that hill ... "
"I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born."
"Yes, who was emperor back then?
David Nicholls
#82. The tourist's paradox: how to find somewhere that's free of people exactly like us.
David Nicholls
#83. 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
#84. And is that what love looks like
all wet mouths and your skirt rucked up?"
"Sometimes it is.
David Nicholls
#85. That line again. For Ian, a joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hands like a cheap umbrella.
David Nicholls
#86. 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
David Nicholls
#87. Clearly the key to having a long and successful marriage would be to have a non-lethal heart attack every three months or so
David Nicholls
#88. Imagine staying awake all night not because you're worried about the future but because it's FUN
David Nicholls
#89. But i hate this date, and will always hate this day every year fromnow on whenever it comes around
David Nicholls
#90. 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
#91. The idea that someone, man or woman, should receive any kind of extra attention or affection or popularity or respect or adulation, simply because of a quirk of genetics and some arbitrary male-media-defined subjective notion of 'beauty' seems to me inherently wrong and unacceptable.
David Nicholls
#92. 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.
David Nicholls
#93. I would never complain about 'One Day' taking off, but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.
David Nicholls
#94. I considered the concept of "oversharing", and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.
David Nicholls
#95. realist works I look for detail; 'Look at the eyelashes!
David Nicholls
#96. 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.
David Nicholls
#97. 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
#98. And once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind
David Nicholls
#99. Brian: I love books
Prof. Morrison: The contents of books, or just owning a whole load of books?
David Nicholls
#100. In rare moments of self-doubt, Dexter had once worried that a lack of intellect might hold him back in life, but here was a job where confidence, energy, perhaps even a certain arrogance were all that mattered, all qualities that lay within his grasp.
David Nicholls
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