Quotes from David Nicholls

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

Don't run before you ca walk.

Don't run before you can walk.

Yet there seemed to be no easy correlation between the awful grief I felt at her death and our closeness – or lack of it – in life, and it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.

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.

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.

realist works I look for detail; 'Look at the eyelashes!

He looks at the glass, almost ritualistically, then drains it, and thinks: not drinking would be so much easier if it wasn't so delicious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

So - whatever happened to you?' 'Life. Life happened.

And then some days you wake up and everything's perfect.

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.

I think reality is overrated.

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.

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.

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.