Quotes from David Nicholls

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.

The unrequited love of ones' only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn

Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of such glorious confusion.

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.

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.

I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university 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.

Work hard at . . . something.

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.

Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.

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.

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

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 think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it's easier, isn't it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.

Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.

…surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.

but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?